The Natural History of Your Place

By definition, natural history is the scientific understanding of living organisms and the natural world. Understanding our natural history is important, as it provides a key piece of the puzzle leading towards greater knowledge about our past, present and future. There are many facets within natural history, and these videos focus on some of those.



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The Human History of Your Place

Humans have greatly impacted the earth, especially since the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s. Knowing our history is therefore important to map land and water changes and understand human development and management, and how can we make it more sustainable. Our video lectures focus on:



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How Healthy is Your Living Environment?

Our environments are susceptible to change, both natural and anthropogenic (human-made). Therefore, gauging environmental health can allow us to better understand and adapt to these changes. For example, we can map and model changes in water quality and quantity, observe changes in species biodiversity and evaluate environmental health. Selected videos focus on:



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How Can We Adapt to Climate Change?

Climate change is something that we must all be aware of. Scientific understanding and discoveries surrounding anthropogenic climate change - seen with increased levels of CO2 - are leading adaptive management actions from various levels of governing bodies. The video lectures focus on:



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How Can We Scale From Local to Global to Local?

In order to know how a system works, we need to first understand its integral parts. By using the whole system approach based on biomimicry we learn from nature's wisdom. Therefore, we can use our local systems knowledge and upscale it to help provide solutions at a global systems scale. This in turn will feed help back to our local communities. Hence local to global to local!



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Coasts and Communities

is an open course by the School for the Environment and College of Advancing and Professional Studies at UMass Boston. This five-week open course introduces participants to fundamental concepts in coastal environmental science and shows how to collect and evaluate data to solve real-world local environmental problems.

The course will next be offered in Spring 2014. Join Course Mailing List.

This is a map with lectures from the Fall 2013 offering of the course.

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