The Aquatic City: The Ecology of Urban Waterways

From the City of Austin –

Brown Bag Lunch and Learn

Thursday June 15^th | 12:00 pm – 1:00 PM

One Texas Center | Room 325

505 Barton Springs Road, Austin Tx 78704

Free surface and garage parking available.

This Month | Urban aquifers, creeks, rivers, lakes, and ponds can support a rich variety of life, but they are also highly vulnerable to pollution and other human impacts. Austin is such an aquatic city that we have a “watershed protection” department rather than an “environmental protection” department. This lecture will examine the role of water and waterways in urban ecology, and it will highlight examples of aquatic habitats and the biodiversity found there, as well as examples of management and restoration of urban waterways.

A Note From Nature in the City | Seating is first come, first serve. Please fill in all available seats farthest from the entry door first. We thank you!

Full 2017 Calendar at One Texas Center

The 2017 Lunchtime Lectures will explore the complex relationship between the city and nature in America. Our American narrative of nature celebrates wilderness or “pristine nature” and rural or “pastoral nature” in contrast to the degradation of urban landscapes. However, we are now predominately a country of urbanites who have only recreational contact with wilderness or pastoral nature. To compensate for our urban “nature deficit”, we have incorporated “green space” into our cities – preserves, parks, farms, and gardens – to allow for contact with officially sanctioned approximations of wild and pastoral nature in the urban landscape. Ecologists are called on to mediate and to assess whether it is a real ecosystem, and thereby add another chapter to the narrative entitled “urban ecology” in which science measures ecological cycles and ecosystem function in the city. The 2017 Lunchtime Lectures are an attempt to disentangle this complex story of ecology, culture, and the American City and, perhaps, to give us all a better understanding of urban nature and the role it plays in our lives.

Kevin Anderson Ph.D.

Kevin is a geographer and philosopher researching the nature of, and the nature in, urban wastelands. He studied at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania [BA], Durham University, England, Ohio University [MA] where he taught philosophy and symbolic logic. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation entitled: Marginal Nature: Urban Wastelands and the Geography of Nature. His research interests include sewage treatment, soil ecology, and sustainable agriculture, urban ecology and sustainability, riparian ecology, environmental history, philosophy, and literature. He is a co-founder of the Texas Riparian Association and the Upper Tisza Foundation in northeastern Hungary. He runs the Austin Water-Center for Environmental Research which focuses on soil, sewage recycling, and environmental trace contaminants; rivers, riparian ecology, and alluvial aquifers; cities, biodiversity, and avian ecology.

Brought to you by Austin Water Utility, Center for Environmental Research (CER), The University of Texas, Texas A&M University. Nature in the City – Austin is sponsored by the Community Trees Division, and helps to implement the Imagine Austin and Urban Forest Plans.

CER and Hornsby Bend are on Facebook! Visit to see what’s happening today! Want more? Yes! Visit the Marginal Nature Blog and Nature in the City – Austin Blog.