Growing up in places like Haiti, Paraguay, and Brazil, the grinding poverty and environmental degradation were always up close and personal. Slums, diseased bodies, and triumphs of the human spirit were as much a part of everyday life as spectacular coral reefs, deep jungles, and decimated rainforests. Today Michael Jennings spends his time as a scientist and teacher, working--sometimes desperately--to achieve a sustainable planet.
One of his early jobs was with a team that first used sonar to track juvenile salmon as they migrated out to the ocean through the dams on the Columbia River. He discovered that the young fish migrate mostly at night and even if they survived their passage through the spillways and turbines, few came through without wounds from the massive hydraulics of the dams, and many of those wounds would become infected down river in the estuary under the stress of adjusting to saltwater. He went on to study land use planning and later earned a Ph.D. in environmental science and ecology.
Michael learned a lot about the power and the passion that communities could have for conserving local nature while leading the establishment of wild and scenic rivers in New Jersey (of all places) with the National Park Service. But it was during his years as an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, leading an effort to lean how well or how poorly animal species and their habitats are being managed across the U.S., that he fully grasped how quickly and how seriously our web of life is unraveling.
As a senior scientist for global priorities and trends with The Nature Conservancy, using the power of satellite images and GIS, Michael exposed a detailed picture of the spectacular and ancient diversity that exists across the mountains, deserts, islands, jungles, and grasslands of the world. Among his many projects that provided critical worldwide data for the first time ever, he calculated and mapped the phylogenetic diversity of all the terrestrial animals of the world, developed a worldwide assessment of landscape fragmentation, mapped the most remote wild lands and where all the good farmland is that has not yet been converted from wild land to agriculture, and is therefore the most threatened. He developed a way to track the clearing of forests everywhere and all the time with satellite images. With these and other data he developed a data-driven basis for establishing global conservation priorities.
With the terabytes of geographic information that his team at The Nature Conservancy developed, Michael and his colleagues talked about being among the privileged few to see and study life across the entire planet at one time. With all this information, they decided to write "The Atlas of Global Conservation: Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities to Make a Difference", which will be released by the University of California Press on Earth Day 2010.
Michael has written more than fifty scientific papers, monographs, and books on biodiversity and conservation. He works at the University of Idaho, teaching biogeography and conservation. His research focus is mostly on how nature is responding to climate change, and developing a Google Future Earth. He and his family like to hike in the high country of the Northern Rocky Mountains, where, weather permitting, you can see forever.
You can learn more about Michael at http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljenningsphd
