Jenny Aleman-Zometa is an IoES doctoral student in the residency phase of the program. She is currently a Project Manager for the Regulatory Division at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Previously, she was the Program Director for the Los Angeles River State Park Partners. For her dissertation, she is studying urban nature parks in Los Angeles with Dr. Richard Ambrose.
Today over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, people are moving towards cities and urban parks will become the spaces where people will most often interact with nature. At the same time, parks can help with conservation by creating new nature stewards, by being linkages between other urban green spaces, and providing habitat for migrating birds. These urban nature parks present this tremendous opportunity to meet so many different needs, but can they? As an ecologist and a city dweller I am curious to learn how.
