Media and Public Scholarship
My public scholarship has been featured in local, national, and international media. My work with extension agents, planners, and policy makers in Florida over the last decade to co-design climate futures scenarios, was discussed on NPR’s 1A show in 2019, and this year on NPR’s Environmental Connections. Most recently, I carried out forest ethnography on the social lives of trees and inequities in tree canopy coverage in the City of Tampa. I was a guest on AnthroPod, the podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology discussing our work and the Tampa Bay Times ran a story on impacts of Hurricane Milton on our urban forest. In October 2024, I received the NSF/Every Page Foundation Ocean Decade Champion award.
News Media Coverage, Podcasts, and Other Public Scholarship
Climate Change, Climate Futures
Climate and Society REU, “REU Site Proposal: Weather, Climate and Society: An interdisciplinary approach integrating physical and social sciences.” I worked closely with REU students from other universities in the U.S. in summers of 2018 and 2019 to collect data on urban Tampa residents’ perceptions and experiences of climate change. That work was presented as an invited lecture and discussion at the USF STEM Collaborative Event called “Science, Strategies and Solutions: Addressing Climate Change in Tampa Bay”, and picked up by USF news and featured in a story about the conference, which also led to an appearance on a local news station show to discuss the topic of climate change in Florida in January 2020.
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Panelist on the The 1A Show, NPR:
https://the1a.org/shows/2019-02-11/storm-clouds-and-sunshine-how-florida-prepares-for-climate-change. pdf
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Local TV news live segment on climate change: How climate change could impact Florida Posted: Jan 9, 2020
Dr. Rebecca Zarger, from the University of South Florida’s Department of Anthropology, and Dr. Gary Mitchum, from USF’s College of Marine Sciences, discussed how climate change could be impacting our future.
Forest Ethnography: Tree Canopy Change, and Social Meanings of Trees
Permanent link to Tampa Tree Canopy 2021 Study report: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/geo_facpub/2368/
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Live recording of November 30, 2023 Presentation to Tampa City Council on the key findings of the 2021 Tree Canopy Study:
https://www.tampa.gov/city-planning/natural-resource-planning/tree-canopy-analysis
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City of Tampa website with presentation to City Council:
https://www.tampa.gov/document/city-tampa-tree-canopy-and-urban-forest-analysis-2021-132846
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Tampa’s tree canopy is shrinking. Can anyone save it for the shade? By Michaela Mulligan, Times staff
Published Aug. 29, 2023|Updated Sept. 11, 2023
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Number of trees declining in Tampa Bay ABC Action News TV interview 11/30/23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CtvJDOJKq0
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Tree planting project 3/1/24
https://www.fox13news.com/news/tampa-to-plant-30000-trees-by-2023-to-restore-citys-canopy
Guest on AnthroPod Discussing Forest Ethnography and Community-Centered Anthropology in Tampa
Jacobs, Sharon. 2024. “Eyes on Florida: Community-centered Anthropology in Tampa Bay.” AnthroPod, Fieldsights, October 31. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/eyes-on-florida-community-centered-anthropology-in-tampa-bay
Waterscapes and Water Scarcity in Tampa Bay
Political ecologies of water through the Tampa Urban Long-Term Ecological Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) project, “Urban Development, Power Relations, and Water Redistribution as Drivers of Wetland Change in the Tampa Bay Region Ecosystem.” For more on that project, see my page on Politics and Perceptions of Water and our project Facebook page.