“It’s difficult to research death,” Dr. Suzanne Agan admitted, regarding wildlife deaths. Even when the focus is on wildlife survival, “People are not going to choose something that is hard to digest.” 

The scientists and individuals who were concerned about wildlife loss found success in Yellowstone National Park. When Yellowstone was first established in 1872, the Grey Wolf population was abundant, but the Wolves soon found themselves face to face with humans who wanted them gone. The consequences of eliminating a top predator from an ecosystem were unknown, so the wolves were progressively wiped  out without a second thought. That changed in 1973, once the Grey Wolf was listed as Endangered under the Endangered Species Act. The USFWS had recognized that this extirpation did, in fact, have environmental consequences. The creation of the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan in 1987 aimed to establish Grey Wolf populations in Yellowstone once more. The plan was able to successfully bring back 300 Grey Wolfs. This program, along with others made to establish Wolf populations throughout the states became increasingly popular, hoping to have the same success as Yellowstone. 

  Her lasting passion for wolves also made it easy for Dr. Agan to pursue Red Wolf research while pursuing her PhD in Antioch University New England. Dr. Agan now works with the Red Wolf Recovery Team (RWRT) in North Carolina to study how Red Wolves are being affected by poaching and what can be done to stop this. 

The RWRT was created alongside the Red Wolf Recovery Area (RWRA) in 1987 by the U.S Fisheries and Wildlife Services (USFWS) in order to protect and bring back the Red Wolf population in North Carolina. North Carolina, like much of the United States, used to have thousands of wolves roaming the land. Similar to what happened in Yellowstone, Red Wolves were essentially wiped out in North Carolina. Red Wolves are now considered the world’s most endangered wolf. The RWRA has dedicated itself to designating the recovery area and reintroducing the species.]

“There’s only about 20 in the wild right now,” Dr. Agan explains. She hopes that by reducing poaching, the population will bounce back. 

Dr. Agan clarified what poaching means, she knew that the word had a relatively negative association. Poaching is often associated with an unlawful individual who illegally kills hundreds of deer or turkey for money. She explained that “Poaching is the sole action of killing the animal, not the intent. A hunter can be out hunting deer, shoot what he thinks is a coyote, and it turns out to be a wolf, that’s still poaching.” Since the Red Wolf is currently listed as an endangered species by the U.S Government, killing one is illegal. Dr. Agan also pointed out that hunters target bears and deer, not Red Wolves. Moreover, Red Wolves are scared of people and have no interest in being around them, which means they are not really considered a threat to human life. There was no good reason for landowners to kill  Red Wolves.

Dr. Agan heavily emphasized that the main reason for Red Wolf poaching was that landowners “don’t want government intrusion on their property.” Even though the RWRA is nearly 6,000 km2, that did not stop the Red Wolves from going beyond its boundaries. The RWRA program was put back into action in 2021 after being put on pause due to program technicalities that had to be addressed. Red Wolves started showing up on landowners’ property outside of the RWRA,  leaving landowners confused and angry since the FWS had not said that the Wolves were being reintroduced. 

  The FWS then attempted to give landowners ways to co-exist with the Red Wolves. Dr. Agan told me that if a Red Wolf ever wanders onto their property, they could call the FWS to remove it and take it back to the RWRA. But the landowners are reluctant. They were already upset and since a call to the FWS meant the government would be on their property. To avoid both, landowners would kill  the Red Wolves. If there were no Red Wolves present, there would be no reason for the FWS to come onto their property. 

 “You won’t be able to protect wolves if landowners are not on board, you can’t just slap high fines on people and throw em’ in jail,” Dr. Agan chuckled wearily. Despite the fact that it may seem like a good idea to appropriately punish landowners for poaching, that only makes local residents more  resistant to the recovery program.  

Dr. Agan noticed that having someone who was able to make the landowners feel heard and included greatly aided in recovery efforts.  “One of the older biologists who worked on the project – they had so much respect for him and liked him so much.”  In that case, when he told people not to shoot a wolf, they wouldn’t out their respect for him.   they said they would not shoot a Red Wolf on their property, because they had too much respect for the biologist they were working with.” She continued to say that including landowners in the RWRT was essential if they wanted to work towards a solution and have actually bought them in to be a part of the team. 

Dr. Agan believes it is possible to reduce Red Wolf poaching and increase the species odds of recovery. As long as the RWRA and FWS include every stakeholder, most importantly landowners, to get to that solution. Dr. Agan is optimistic about working with the hunters, noting that they may be the key to bringing back the Red Wolf population.  “They need to get hunting orgs to be on board with protecting Red Wolves…The hunting community is the one that poaches the most…they have the ability and they have access – they are out where the wolves are with the gun in their hand.”

I met Jim Woolford in Oklahoma at the National Environmental Tar Creek Conference. The conference was about one of the country’s oldest Superfund sites, Tar Creek, an area with extreme environmental contamination. Woolford delivered the keynote address on the history of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) involvement at Tar Creek. His long list of critiques and hopes for the future of the EPA was eye-opening. 

During his keynote address, Woolford made an offhand remark about the Environmental Protection Network, the organization he is volunteering for during his retirement. The Network is a non-profit that holds the EPA to the highest standards. Five hundred retired EPA employees comprise it. Even though Woolford was not at the conference to talk about the Network, his comment piqued my curiosity. So, I asked Woolford if he would be willing to sit down and discuss his work at the Network with me, which he kindly agreed to. 

When we met over Zoom, Woolford started by introducing himself, explaining how he started at the EPA in 1986. He emphasized being an EPA employee wasn’t ever his planned career goal. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and political science and getting a master’s focused on state and local politics Woolford “stumbled into” the EPA while working at a consulting firm that took on the EPA as a client. Over the next thirty-four years, he held a variety of positions at the EPA, rising to director of the Superfund Program. At the end of his career in 2020, he received the Distinguished Career Award.

People Walking at a Minewaste Pile (one of many) at the Tar Creek Superfund Site

[Source: Author]

Woolford’s long career and success with the EPA begged a question—why, after such a long and successful career would Woolford choose to devote his retirement to an organization that critiques the EPA?

Woolford doesn’t consider his work at the Network as one simply rooted in criticism. He describes The Network as improving people’s lives by explaining choices that the EPA has made and directing communities to other organizations, such as the Thriving Earth Exchange, that can help address the concerns of communities living near Superfund sites. By building a network of environmental organizations, the Network helps communities impacted by Superfund sites access resources to navigate the complicated politics of environmental health. This is something that I witnessed the Network do firsthand at the Tar Creek conference as Woolford took great care in explaining the EPA’s actions there and how the community could fight for a better future. When I asked directly why he invested so much time in the Network despite being retired, Woolford said that “public service is somewhat like a religion.” He may have retired from the EPA, but he hasn’t retired from public service. 

During our conversation, I also asked Woolford about working for the EPA during the Trump administration. Woolford’s answer was incredibly diplomatic yet honest. He explained how, while Trump was president, the Superfund program gained backing from the administration.  In his view, this was just for show. Superfund became “the favorite child,” but that didn’t get the program any genuine support. Despite that frustration, Woolford had nothing but good things to say about the experience of working at the EPA overall. After several tumultuous decades under presidents with very different levels of commitment to the environment and environmental health, Woolford enthusiastically tried to convince me to work for the EPA. 

Sign Found at Tar Creek Superfund Site

[Source: Author]

So how can we best understand the Network and Jim Woolford’s role? I would call it a friendly watchdog organization, monitoring the actions of the EPA and holding it to the highest standards. The Network does essential work for communities impacted by Superfund sites. Seeing Woolford at the Tar Creek conference was evidence to me of the Network’s commitment to healing some of the most environmentally devastated parts of the country. Members of the Network such as Woolford are not only making sure the EPA does its best for the country, the people, and the environment but also improving many lives by explaining the EPA’s actions and directing communities to organizations beyond the EPA or themselves that can help. 

“You can always tell an environmental law professor’s office because right next to their desk on the wall, there’s a dent,” Professor Richard Lazarus tells me, half jokingly.  “I’ve been hitting my head against that wall for about the past 30 years.”

In the past decade, Lazarus has been frustrated with, “see[ing] us stumbling so poorly on climate.” He worries that we won’t be able to avoid the worst outcomes of climate change. Why? He explains, we lost four years during the Trump Administration. President Trump rolled back, revoked, or reversed over one-hundred environmental rules. Will environmental law recover? Will the courts be able to help us after President Trump gave the Supreme Court a conservative majority? These concerns preoccupy Lazarus.

It hasn’t always been this frustrating. Looking back on how he got into the field, Lazarus reflects on his roots. Born and raised in Urbana, Illinois, he graduated from high school young and enrolled in college at the age of 16. At the time, Lazarus notes, he still looked like he was 12 years old. After trying to take classes, Lazarus dropped out. He realized he needed to grow up some more and find something, as he put it, “that made [his] heart go pitter-patter”. 

After traveling Europe with other teenagers and finding more of himself, he re-enrolled at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign. Lazarus decided to get a B.S. in Chemistry and B.A. in economics. For him, a defining moment was when he knocked on his advisor’s door and told him his plan. Instead of turning away, the professor took him seriously. He said “okay, how are you going to do that?” Lazarus remembers. Lazarus never looked back. 

While studying chemistry and economics, Lazarus worked hard, even spending a semester at MIT. After graduating, he was admitted into Harvard Law School. Yet, he keeps his roots close. Lazarus proudly asserts, “I think people in the Midwest have less swagger.” He notes, “I knew all sorts of really talented, wonderful people who didn’t end up at Harvard Law School and this and that. And that’s just because of the quirks of life.” So, he built a career centered around how to best enact distributive and transitional justice in environmental law. 

Currently, Lazarus is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Over his career, he has provided written briefs to the Supreme Court forty times and has made oral arguments in 14 of those cases. Clients in these cases have included state and local governments and environmental groups. Moreover, Lazarus was the principal author of the Report to the President and National Commission on the BP Deep Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission. Following the 2020 Presidential Election, Lazarus was appointed to lead the incoming Biden administration’s Transition Team for the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Despite the success of his personal career, he is still disappointed with the state of environmental law. In his first edition of The Making of Environmental Law, published in 2004, Lazarus remembers his optimism. He is now feeling frustrated with “underestimat[ing] how much, among other things, the sort of wicked dimensions of climate change were going to cause upheaval and ultimately disaster.” In his second edition of The Making of Environmental Law, published in 2023, Lazarus poses his theory of what happened since: “For three decades, we’ve been saying ‘train, train, train’ and we had a moment at the beginning of the Obama administration where we thought something was gonna happen.” At the time, it seemed Democrats and Republicans were ready to take action together. 

But Lazarus recalls “The here and now [of politics] just cratered us politically.” In 2010, Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives cratered us. And, in 2016, President Trump was elected, directly placing a climate denier in the White House. As Lazarus put it, the trajectory of environmental law has become a “trainwreck.”

When asked about the future, Lazarus says that “the courts aren’t going to save us.” While the courts have advanced environmental issues in cases such as Massachusetts vs. EPA, Lazarus doesn’t believe that there is any substitute for elected officials making change. 

While reflecting on his career, Lazarus is happy to have helped the next future of lawyers. He notes, “Oh, legacy? And that’s easy. It’s teaching.” While Lazarus notes that the Supreme Court arguments and working with the Biden/Harris transition team have been great fun, he loves his students. In fact, he “gets a huge kick out of them.” And, while there is a lot of work to be done, Lazarus remains hopeful. At the end of our interview, Lazarus posits, “you know who they are gonna listen to?” He points to me, the next generation of environmental advocates.

Imani Black // Credit: Minorities in Aquaculture

Imani Black is reshaping and rethinking the aquaculture industry. From founding Minorities in Aquaculture (MIA) to her own personal research on  shellfish aquaculture and Black maritime history, Imani is making an impact. In just three short years, MIA has partnered with the NOAA Sea Grant program, the Pew Research Center, the Chesapeake Bay Program, Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, and other organizations to connect women of color in  the aquaculture industry on a local and global scale.

Imani’s passion for the Chesapeake Bay did not develop overnight. She can trace her family’s watermen roots in Maryland back over 200 years. In high school, her interest in marine sciences led her focus to the eastern oyster. The oyster has connected many aspects of life in the bay, from cultural to economic to ecological, for hundreds of years. This led Imani to study Marine Biology in college and pursue a career in aquaculture. Like many other African American families, Imani’s and her family have been engaged in the stewardship of the Chesapeake for generations.

The legacy of Black maritime history in the Chesapeake Bay is frequently, and often intentionally, overlooked. African Americans have been crabbing, fishing, sailing, and managing the waters since the arrival of colonists to what would be called Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Building boats, forging metal oyster tongs, Black people have made long lasting and widespread impacts on the waters and cultures of the Chesapeake Bay. Some of the first African Americans to legally be considered citizens of the United States were “Black Jacks”, watermen and oyster fishers from the Chesapeake Bay Region. These Black Jacks possessed a Seamen’s Protection Certificate, granting them American citizenship around 70 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. From harvesting to packing, African Americans across the Chesapeake Bay mastered highly specialized skills that frequently made them more adept sailors than most white sailors. Along with harvesting oysters for sale in markets, African American watermen planted shellfish for later sale at the market, creating some of the first “aquaculture” seen in the region.

However, commercial aquaculture as it is known today wasn’t introduced into the Chesapeake Bay until the 1990’s. Aquaculture is the cultivation of aquatic organisms through breeding, raising, and harvesting in controlled environments. Following the major population declines of oysters from diseases, overfishing, and environmental changes in the bay in the late 20th century, aquaculture was introduced as a way to support the demands of the oyster industry without destroying wild fisheries. Through shellfish leases, watermen have the ability to farm shellfish, most commonly oysters, in sections of a body of water. In the 1970’s, nearly a third of leaseholders on the Nanticoke River in Virginia were Black men. Today, aquaculture is the fastest growing food industry globally. However, aquaculture accounted for only 7% of the United States’ total domestic production of seafood in 2022. In the Chesapeake Bay, the industry is overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.

Oyster tonger. Wicomico River, Maryland, 1941. // Credit: Reginald Hotchkiss, Library of Congress

Together with wild-caught harvest, aquaculture attempts to create a more sustainable way to utilize fisheries. Seafood is central to the economy and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region, but without change there could be no population left to fish. The growth of the aquaculture industry is key to maintaining healthy wild fisheries, especially in the Chesapeake Bay.  “Sustainability for me is when both areas, environmentally and economically, are balanced,” says Imani. “Then, that’s when we really have sustainable industry. Aquaculture falls into that because the ultimate goal is to play to both, feed into both.”

This sustainability, in practice, prioritizes economics and ecology while omitting the importance of people. Cultural sustainability, or keeping the traditions and heritage alive of populations, has fallen by the wayside. In Maryland, Imani can only name one aquaculture farm that is owned by an African American. She can name none owned by women. Of the 11,244 licensed captains employed in the United States, only 6.7% are Black or African-American. African Americans have championed traditions of stewardship and connection between the people and the water, but this isn’t reflected in the region’s current demographic of aquaculturists.

Imani wanted to make a change. In 2020, she founded Minorities in Aquaculture (MIA). “I didn’t start MIA to be this big thing,” says Imani. “I just impulsively was like ‘I have never worked with another woman of color in my space’ and I wanted to expand on that.” The mission of MIA is to educate minority women about the benefits provided by local and global aquaculture in order to promote a more diverse, inclusive aquaculture industry.

Like the discovery that Imani had herself, MIA wishes to bring more women of color in the industry. “We are trying to build a successful pipeline and bridge between aquaculture and the groups that are unrepresented in the industry using [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] DEI tactics.” As of MIA’s 2023 annual report, the organization has supported over 200 members globally, raised over $200,000 in support for program funding, as well as fully funding internship positions in the aquaculture industry for 17 women of color since 2023. When only 15% of nearly 60 million full-time workers in the aquaculture industry globally are women, these internship positions allow for more stability and support when entering the workforce.

Now a masters student at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory, Imani is adding academia to her list of oyster experience. In her studies, she personal experience of the aquaculture industry to the discussion while highlighting the voices of minorities. The miscommunications between what is realistically beneficial to aquaculturists, whether intentional or not, create more issues for the industry as a whole. Imani says, “What’s important here isn’t necessarily important in another sector, it isn’t viewed in the same way. For all of us to get on the same page we have to understand each other’s value systems.” To better understand these value systems, MIA conducted a 2023 survey of the experiences regarding women, women of color, and the LGBTQIA+ community in aquaculture. Of the over 140 respondents, 77% report struggling to remain in the industry long-term because of a lack of financing or grants. This census aims to unite interests of minorities in aquaculture in setting a baseline for understanding what it means to be a minority in aquaculture and inform future advocacy.

As Imani continues her work with MIA, her graduate research informs the organization’s mission. “It’s been an experience of understanding the different nuances of academia and how they are different from the sectors I have been in aquaculture. But also, I have been really intentional about the research I’ve been doing,” says Imani. Through her research collecting oral histories, Imani is compiling the first account of Black maritime history in the Chesapeake Bay since the 1990’s written by a member of the community. “I didn’t want to just do a lab project that was on my advisor’s list of projects that he wanted to do. My research is the only social science based project at Horn Point right now. It’s really looking at the historic involvement of African Amerians in the Chesapeake Bay commercial fisheries, trying to figure out the domino effect of how we went from being one of the most predominant demographics in fisheries for a very long time to now having only 12 living Black commercial captains still working.”

MIA founder Imani Black talks oysters with the women of the Billion Oyster Project in NYC. // Credit: Courtesy of Caroline J. Phillips and Jeannette Ralyea Watson, Minorities in Aquaculture.

Imani Black and Minorities in Aquaculture strive to connect people to science and industry, educating and promoting diversity and excellence while simultaneously changing the landscape of aquaculture as a whole. Further information about Minorities in Aquaculture and Imani’s research can be found at www.mianpo.org and on Instagram at @imaniiiblackkk.

In East Boston, close to the Maverick T station on Broder Street, there used to be an abandoned steel factory. Now, the site is a newly built, beautiful two-tower midrise with a restaurant on the ground floor and affordable income apartments above. 

While the modern spin on a brick exterior is attractive, the comprehensive green building, energy conservation, and renewable energy planning is the real star. Due to its location on the Boston Harbor, the building was designed with a focus on climate resilience. The floor elevations are above Boston’s current Flood Elevation levels and flood relief vents. 

Behind this project is Kimberley Vemeer, founder and CEO of Urban Habitat Initiatives, a sustainability consulting firm that is working to make green building and climate resilience a reality.

When Kimberley Vermeer was in her twenties, she left her job to travel for a year. Vermeer’s time in the South Pacific islands was especially consequential, “What really struck me there was how these tiny islands were trying to live like Americans and Australians and New Zealanders.” She recalled that in emulating the Western lifestyle, there was a surge in used car imports leading to infrastructure problems like air pollution and traffic jams in on small islands like Fiji and Tahiti. 

When Vermeer came back to the United States in the 1990s, informed by her experiences while traveling, she knew that she wanted to do work with an environmental focus. “At that time, there were no Environmental Studies majors. There were no programs, there weren’t really even job descriptions. And so to do what I wanted to do, I said, ‘Okay, well, I’m just going to try to do it on my own.’” Vermeer decided to work independently and founded Urban Habitat Initiatives in 1997 to ensure that green building, health, and sustainability are integral to the planning and realization of development projects and communities. Nowadays, her company is one of the preeminent sustainability consulting firms in New England. That  climate-ready building on Border Street is just one of their many projects. 

Vermeer’s experience and education prepared her well to launch her business. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s in Arts and Design, she served in the Peace Corps as an architect in the Kingdom of Tonga, and she has a Master’s degree in policy and planning from the Harvard Kennedy School. Before founding Urban Habitat Initiatives, Vermeer worked in affordable housing finance, first at the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation and later at a small consulting firm. 

One of the current trends in green housing, Vermeer explains, is that US policymakers have gone from just pushing for energy efficiency to focusing on electrifying buildings. On one level this makes sense.  An building that depends only on electricity, not fossil fuels, can be fully powered with renewable energy systems. The burning of fossil fuels for electricity and heating is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Electrifying buildings can help shift to cleaner energy sources, such as renewables (solar, wind, hydro), which produce electricity with lower or zero emissions.

In Boston, there’s a strong commitment to net zero carbon by 2050. So to receive funding to build any type of affordable housing in the city, that building is required to be ready to be at net zero carbon emissions. While this move can help the environment, Vermeer points out some aspects to consider, “The concern that I have is that it’s pushing the mandate to the individual buildings and the individual developers and it’s pushing everyone to the only solution they can afford, which is to do an air source heat pumps.” 

Air source heat pumps offer energy-efficient heating and cooling by extracting warmth from the ambient air. They are suitable for various climates, lower utility bills, and enhance energy sustainability. Although they are a good solution, Vermeer knows of better one: a geothermal district heating system. 

A geothermal district heating system is considered one of the best renewable energy options because it provides reliable energy by harnessing the Earth’s natural heat. However, Vermeer emphasizes that a shared geothermal network offers efficiency through centralized generation, reducing energy waste and optimizing resource utilization. “We’re not building or even really thinking about building out any sort of shared solution.” It offers a model for community-level sustainability, which is something the U.S. needs.

The shift towards all-electric buildings is leading to new learning experiences for affordable housing designers, installers, and maintenance teams. Electrification involves the adoption of air-source heat pumps for heating and cooling, heat-pump water heaters for hot water generation, electric cooking, and the inclusion of electric vehicle charging stations in new construction. While positive, these changes will result in greater electrical demands. That requires larger electrical  panels and, in some cases, larger transformers.

In an article Vermeer recently wrote for Shelterforce, she emphasizes that the financial implications of electrification raise important equity concerns. Clean-energy conversions can reduce carbon emissions, but may increase energy costs, as electricity is more expensive than natural gas in many markets. In the article, Andre Jones, Nuestra Comunidad’s senior real estate project manager, says that “In Boston, electricity costs are higher than natural gas prices.” In response, affordable housing providers are reevaluating how utility costs are allocated and structured.

Kimberley Vermeer’s journey work reminds us that sustainability is a process that requires adaptability, innovation, and a commitment to creating greener and more equitable communities for all. As the affordable housing sector navigates this transition, it becomes clear that a balance must be struck between environmental responsibility and financial sustainability. Despite these challenges, Vermeer emphasizes that greening affordable housing is a necessity, “If we are trying to be more equitable in the world of sustainability…then making sure that affordable housing is built to green standards is an important way to be delivering on equity goals.”

“Math is a necessary evil,” explains Alexis Helgeson. Considering a recent national survey revealed the largest score declines in math in elementary schools since 1990, it is evident that math may not be America’s strong suit. Nor favorite. 

No one knows this better than Helgeson. Her very career as an environmental mathematician places her squarely in front of math aversionists. “People don’t like thinking about [math],” Helgeson admits, adding how most people find her career path confusing. “The attitude I get from a lot of people is that ‘environmental mathematician’ is not even a job title.” Yet Helgeson can not help but try to prove them wrong– “math is a universal language,” relevant to everything people care about, Helgeson explains in earnest.

And like math itself, it seems that Helgeson’s life has always consisted of a litany of proofs to be made.

Helgeson with a turtle. Source: Alexis Helgeson

Growing up, Helgeson dreamed of leaving Earth behind as an astronaut. First as a master’s student at Boston University’s Earth and Environment Department and now, as a research assistant in Yale’s School of the Environment, Helgeson has instead taken to proving that despite the changing scope of Earth’s systems, the key to more accurate global climate predictions is within reach.

How does she bear this burden of proof? It wasn’t always an easy equation for Helgeson to solve. “There’s an assumption that because I’m now involved in academia, I’ve done really well in school, but it’s not always been the case,” Helgeson chuckles, smiling warmly. Nasty teachers, unwelcoming peers, prejudiced spaces. Helgeson has dealt with the worst of academic life, yet she still quips without a hint of sadness “…[academia] is changing a lot right now…I have a lot of hope.”

No one could have handled it as well as Alexis Helgeson. After all, Helgeson told it straight: “I am the smartest person that I know.”

For her, everything came together during her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke. “I was taking discrete mathematics and an intro to ecology class at the same time.” In math, Helgeson had just started learning about group theory, a form of abstract algebra that studies groups. At their simplest, groups consist of sets of numbers with different relationships to one another. A parent set has characteristics that all the subsequent sets will share. 

This theory inspired Helgeson. “All of the different climate measurements are just the subset of a parent set. If we can bring all the pieces of information together, we can identify the shared characters, and begin to get an idea of a true value.” 

Helgeson does not intend on finding one ‘true value’ to fix the anthropogenic climate change ravaging communities across the world. More accurately, Helgeson’s current work focuses on combining data from land and atmospheric CH4 gas measurements to gain a better understanding of just how global methane cycling works. Not so much a true value, but rather, a more accurate numerical representation of environmental patterns of methane.

Considering methane’s importance to climate change as a fierce energy absorber (and therefore atmosphere-heater), such information will fundamentally bolster ecological knowledge. Despite being the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, methane is chronically underrepresented in the scientific literature. Methane is also one of the few greenhouse gasses with a short lifetime in the atmosphere, meaning that methane reductions today could reduce global temperatures within the next decade. All of this puts Helgeson’s work at the heart of current climate change mitigation strategies.

Helgeson knows that this hunt for her ‘true value,’ or stronger understanding of methane, is a powerful move. The data “…would help to inform…a believable baseline for [methane] emissions of natural systems” that could help with the issuing of methane-credits. Methane-credits are just a spin on carbon-credits: permits to emit greenhouse gasses, which are intended to incentivize economic exchange of CO2, with the ultimate goal of reducing overall emissions efficiently. Building up context-based models of methane is exactly what is needed to make methane-credits the next big economic mitigation tool.

This potential for more accurate and ecologically informed credit-systems proves promising, especially considering Helgeson’s assertion that it is not far off. “The tools are there, and they have been there, but we just need to learn how to use them.” 

And Helgeson is a fast learner. It was actually learning about meteorological forecasting that inspired her prior research at Boston University. Meteorologists’ tried-and-true method of self-informing weather models formed the basis for Helgeson’s unique models, which used data on ecosystem CO2 and H2O gas. 

Essentially, Helgeson was able to take pre-existing data, feed it into her models to create predictions, and then correct those predictions using the next days’ data. Much like how if the weather is predicted to be rain and then it is sunny, this information provides feedback to improve future predictions. Ultimately, Helgeson’s model revealed properties of global carbon and water cycles, and provided a new foundation for future climate models. “This is where…math…is filling in–the gaps.”

So Helgeson’s predictions for the future? “Everything is changing all at once. There’s a lot of cool things happening, and we are realizing that the resources and time spent researching in wealthy countries is not really where we need it.” Helgeson hopes for a future where her research happens not just in America’s northeast, but around the world. As things currently stand, a disproportionate amount of ecological research happens in places like North America and Europe, as opposed to countries at the forefront of climate change such as central Africa and Chad. 

“I have a lot of optimism of what the measurement and data potential is, and the questions we’re going to be able to answer. We need to come together as a [global] community and agree to equitably distribute [research].” Helgeson knows just the way towards global cooperation.

And it all comes back to math. “Math is the most powerful language–it exists outside of everything: ethnicity, race, religion, etc.” Helgeson views math as a powerful tool for the future of not just the climate, but all problems plaguing modern society. “There [can be] infinite ways to solve a problem in math!” she exclaims, before emphatically adding. “It is so beautiful–it could unite us.”

She pauses, momentarily humbled by the power of mathematics. Despite her own awe-inspiring efforts towards climate change mitigation, Helgeson knows that math is not always so well-handled. 

“So many people have stories of people being discouraged from math,” she sighs. Yet it is Helgeson’s firm belief that math–”or statistics, or applied physics, or machine learning, or whatever you want to call it”– is the key to a “shared truth.” 

But Alexis Helgeson remains sympathetic if math still is not quite for you. “I know that when I’m around, people think ‘Oh thank god there’s someone who does like math.’”

Suzanne Stathatos

Suzanne Stathatos didn’t take her first computer science class until junior year of undergrad. Although she received her Bachelor’s in history, Stathatos couldn’t help but explore computer science more after the first class piqued her interest. Stathatos jumped into her Master’s program in Computer Science at Stanford before starting her industry career as software engineer. 

Yet something was still missing. “I’ve always been the kind of person that wants to work towards– like it sounds super cheeseball– but towards making the world a better place,” Stathatos explained. This is what led Stathatos to get involved in the intersection of computer science and the environment. Now a PhD student in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, Stathatos focuses both on studying computer vision’s application to environmental monitoring and making computer vision more widely accessible to environmentalists who don’t have a computing background.

Stathatos’s current research focuses on developing artificial intelligence to monitor fish populations using videos from sonar cameras underwater. Stathatos uses computer vision– a field of artificial intelligence that works with data such as photos and videos– to detect which objects are fish. 

Stathatos’ research finds that using computer vision is the most accurate and efficient way to monitor fish populations. Being able to accurately monitor fish populations is key to verifying both population stability in environmental conditions that aren’t changing and understanding if climate change and climate actions are having an impact. Currently, departments like the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife manually watch “hours and hours” of footage, counting the fish– this is time consuming and costly, and most government agencies are already underfunded. Fish monitoring sometimes gets pushed aside completely. Monitoring via computer vision resolves these problems. 

A sonar image from Stathatos’ research with two fish indicated by green boxes.

However, creating a computer vision model to monitor fish isn’t an easy task. Stathatos and the team she’s part of quickly learned that their computer vision system needed extensive training to be able to detect fish from sonar. Why? Well, Stathatos explained that sonar imagery looks similar to an ultrasound video. Even though an ultrasound tech is usually confident in what they’re seeing, whenever Stathatos has seen an ultrasound image or video she’s thinking “What? How do you see any of that?” Laughing, Stathatos remarked that if you ask any average person where the fish are in a sonar image, they’d have real difficulty finding it. Computers have this problem too. Thankfully, computer vision systems get better with practice.

Ultimately, Stathatos wants her research to be of value to others. She explained that “it would be really cool to see how my research can be used by resource managers to decide how to best allocate their resources.” Stathatos also sees value in making her research project more widely applicable, so she is working to adapt the computer vision model to work for different rivers that are in new locations with fish of different sizes, swim patterns, and population densities. 

Stathatos wants to do more than build her own computer vision models. She wants to help other people build and use them too. To do this, she is working to ensure that computer vision tools are accessible for other environmental researchers and workers. After all, Stathatos emphasized, “your research is really only as good as the person who can take it and use it.” For this reason, she has taught the Computer Vision Methods for Ecology (CV4Ecology) workshop for two years.

2022 and 2023 CV4Ecology workshop group photos.

The CV4Ecology summer workshop teaches post-doc level ecologists, PhD students, and other environmental researchers the basics of computer vision in just three weeks. Participants come in with their own predefined projects, ranging from detecting whale species with audio data to examining insect behavior with stationary cameras. By the end of the workshop, individuals have a start on coding their project and know how to find and use relevant computer vision resources. They also become part of a community of peers that they can rely on. It’s especially exciting for Stathatos to know that many CV4Ecology participants go back to their own universities and research laboratories and teach what they’ve learned to others.

Stathatos’ summer 2023 CV4Ecology cohort: the ‘Pixellads’.

After talking to Stathatos, it’s easy to see why CV4Ecology is a success. Stathatos’ entire face lit up when asked about the course. “I’ll start this off by saying I have one picture on my desk…It’s me and all my cohort people,” Stathatos stated proudly while holding up a framed photo of her summer 2023 CV4Ecology cohort.

It is clear that Stathatos has many strengths that lead her to be a phenomenal mentor to others, humility being one of them. In fact, when asked to share some of her strengths Stathatos first asked if she could speak to the strengths of the other researchers she works with on the fish monitoring project. Even if she wouldn’t say it all explicitly, she has a strong combination of passion, technical skills, and communication abilities (which she’d like to attribute to her history degree) that contribute to her successes.

Stathatos looks forward to seeing all the new ways computer vision can be applied to the environment. Though she’s currently looking at fish, she noted that anything from beavers to bears could be counted in the river– and beyond. The list goes on and on with countless other opportunities of environmental monitoring. Stathatos herself isn’t even quite sure what she’ll do next. Luckily, that’s never stopped her before.

Stathatos with her advisor, Pietro Perona, using the inaturalist app- which uses some of Perona’s computer vision work- to ID turtle species at CalTech.

Image credits: Suzanne Stathatos