David & Christina: Week 1

Introduction to David

David is a hydrogeologist studying the interactions between natural and human systems at the coastal boundary. His research combines geology, hydrology, and ecology to understand how the Earth's landscape responds to changes caused by natural events and rapid urban expansion. Specifically, David investigates land conversion, deforestation, sea level rise, saltwater intrusion and climate change. His expertise is using remote sensing to measure these changes. Sensors on the satellite record different energies reflected off the earth. The amount of reflected energy tells us something about the environment.

We now have access to over three decades of images taken of the earth by NASA’s Landsat satellite. Using this long-term record, combined
with newer satellite technologies David can estimate different land cover types, tree canopy height, growth rates, as well as other earth surface processes. 

Introduction to Christina

Christina Catanese is an environmental scientist, artist, dancer/choreographer, educator, and arts administrator in Philadelphia. As the Director of Environmental Art at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Christina oversees all aspects of creating and implementing an environmental art exhibition program in gallery spaces and on the nature center’s 340 acres of forests and fields. 

Christina has a Masters in Applied Geosciences from the University of Pennsylvania, complementing her BA at Penn in Environmental Studies and Political Science. In parallel, Christina took her first dance class when she was three years old, and hasn’t stopped dancing since. Trained in ballet at a pre-professional level throughout her youth in Pittsburgh, she has expanded her dance repertoire to modern dance, choreography, and dance history. She has presented and performed extensively in the Philadelphia region (Penn Dance Company, Nova Dance Company, Winged Woman Dance Company, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Koresh Artist Showcase, ETC Showcase, and more). 

Working in science communication at the Environmental Protection Agency led her to integrate her art and science pursuits. In striving to make environmental science more accessible to a broad audience, she became acutely aware of how art can illuminate natural processes, communicate meaning, and make deep connections. In her choreographic practice, Christina is currently exploring the ability of dance to take ecological processes that happen over an incredibly long time scale and distill them down to a human scale moment, making them easier to comprehend. She is particularly interested in river systems and the connections between hydrologic pathways and dance pathways. Currently, her favorite organisms are bryophytes.