'The Mannahatta Project': Wildlife Ecologist To Discuss Work

News release prepared by: Emily Vietti, 785-532-1090, evietti@k-state.edu
Friday, October 21, 2011

‘THE Mannahatta Project’: Wildlife Ecologist To Discuss Work

MANHATTAN - Dr. Eric Sanderson is coming to Manhattan to discuss what “the other Manhattan” was like before it was the Big Apple.

Sanderson, senior conservation ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society and director of the Mannahatta Project, will be lecturing at Kansas State University at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26 in Forum Hall at the K-State Student Union. The lecture is free, and the public is welcome.

The Mannahatta Project is an effort to reconstruct the original ecology of Manhattan Island at the time of European discovery in the early seventeenth century. In 2009 Sanderson published the book, “Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City,” illustrated by Markley Boyer. Sanderson also curated an exhibition based on the Mannahatta Project at the Museum of the City of New York in 2009.

After a decade of research, the Mannahatta Project at the Wildlife Conservation Society uncovered the original ecology of Manhattan, one of New York City’s five boroughs. The next project, the Welikia Project, goes beyond the Mannahatta Project to encompass the entire city, discover its original ecology and compare it what we have today. The Welikia Project embraces the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the waters in between, while still serving up all we have learned about Mannahatta.

Through the Mannahatta Project, it was learned that the center of one of the world’s largest and most built-up cities was once a remarkably diverse, natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches, springs, ponds, and streams, supporting a rich and abundant community of wildlife and sustaining people for thousands of years before Europeans arrived on the scene in 1609. The place celebrated for its cultural diversity, was acclaimed by early settlers for its biological diversity and fertility: home to bears, wolves, songbirds, and salamanders, with clear, clean waters jumping with fish, and porpoises and whales in the harbor. In fact, with over 55 different ecological communities, Mannahatta’s biodiversity per acre rivaled that of national parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Great Smoky Mountains.

Sanderson received his Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis. In 2002 Sanderson and colleagues created the Human Footprint map, the first look at human influence globally at less than one-square-mile resolution. He is also an expert on species conservation planning and has contributed to efforts to save lions, tigers, Asian bears, jaguars, tapirs, peccaries, American crocodiles, North American bison and Mongolian gazelle; and landscape planning conservation efforts in Argentina, Tanzania, Mongolia, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Adirondack Park, in the U.S. He has edited two scientific volumes and written numerous scientific papers. His work has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, CNN, NPR, and the New Yorker.

To read more about the Mannahatta Project and the Welikia Project, go to http://welikia.org/.