Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in print in the first issue of H.E.R.E. Journal, which was published in July by The Understory.
The Hudson Valley has long served as a proving ground for how Americans understand their relationship to the natural world. In the 19th century, writers and artists like John Burroughs and Thomas Cole transformed the region into a national symbol—landscape as something to be observed, interpreted and ultimately protected. Their work helped establish the idea that nature was not simply a resource, but a system with cultural, moral and ecological value.
That early tradition was not confined to art and literature. Figures such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing extended these ideas into the design of towns, parks and public spaces, arguing that human settlement should harmonize with natural systems. By the late 19th century, the Hudson Valley had become a center of both aesthetic appreciation and a broader philosophy linking environment, culture and civic life.
Industrialization tested these ideas. As the Hudson River became a conduit for untreated sewage and industrial discharge, it transformed the landscape from a symbol of natural harmony into a site of visible environmental degradation. The scale of that pollution—fouled shorelines, contaminated fish and water unsafe for recreation—provoked a new kind of response. What had been an aesthetic and philosophical appreciation of nature began to take on a more urgent, public dimension, setting the stage for the grassroots environmental activism that would emerge in the decades to follow.
Musicians and organizers like Pete Seeger mobilized communities through the Clearwater movement, while legal advocates such as David Sive helped establish citizens’ rights to challenge environmentally harmful projects, most notably in the case of Consolidated Edison’s attempt to establish a massive hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Highlands.
These efforts marked a turning point. Environmentalism in the Hudson Valley became a matter of appreciation as well as law, policy and public participation. Organizations such as Riverkeeper and Scenic Hudson emerged from this period, embedding environmental stewardship into the region’s civic infrastructure. Over time, this framework—combining advocacy, legal precedent and public engagement—created the conditions for another evolution: the growth of long-term, system-based ecological research.
Today, that legacy continues in a new form. The Hudson Valley has become a dense and evolving center for ecological science, where researchers study forests, rivers, urban environments and human communities as interconnected systems. The naturalists who once documented the region have been joined by a new generation of scientists who analyze it through long-term data, interdisciplinary methods and community-based research.
Local Roots, Global Reach
At the center of this network is the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, an independent research institution that has played a major role in shaping ecological inquiry in the region. According to its president, Joshua Ginsberg, the institute’s work is defined by a combination of commitment and collaborative reach.
“We are really interested in the Hudson Valley,” says Ginsberg, describing an approach grounded in sustained monitoring and partnerships with organizations such as the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Riverkeeper and Scenic Hudson. Research at Cary often begins with local data—from fisheries and invasive species to carbon cycling—but extends outward to address broader ecological questions. “Our scientists all have local roots and global reach,” he says, noting that projects in the region frequently connect to research on systems as varied as tropical forests, freshwater ecosystems and climate dynamics.
That work is supported by a dense network of institutions across the Hudson Valley, from the SUNY system to private colleges and research organizations, with Cary often serving as a central point of collaboration. The institute’s emphasis on ongoing research and interdisciplinary inquiry, Ginsberg says, has helped create an environment where scientists can move beyond narrow specialization to study ecological systems in their full complexity.
This combination of local focus and global relevance is a defining feature of the region’s scientific landscape. Many researchers in the Hudson Valley are engaged in projects that connect site-specific observations to planetary-scale processes, from climate change to biodiversity loss.
For plant ecologist Amy Zanne, who joined Cary in 2024, that connection is central to her work. Her research examines how plants are constructed to survive in different environments: how they transport water, respond to freezing or drought, and adapt over evolutionary time. Increasingly, she has focused on how those traits influence what happens after plants die: “How you’re built for life affects how you store and release carbon once you die,” Zanne explains, describing a line of inquiry that links plant structure to global carbon cycles.
The Hudson Valley provides an environment where such questions can be explored across scales. Its mix of forest types, climate conditions and land-use patterns allows researchers to observe how ecological systems respond to both natural variation and human influence.
The Ecology of Disease
That systems perspective is also central to the work of Dr. Shannon LaDeau, whose research focuses on the intersection of biodiversity, climate and public health. Based at the Cary Institute since 2008, LaDeau studies how ecological conditions shape the spread of diseases carried by ticks and mosquitoes. “In an academic setting, we often strive to become experts in very specific parts of the system,” she says. “I wanted to explore more broadly how ecological systems function.”
That broader view is reflected in her recent research on tick-borne disease in the Northeast, which has found that individual ticks are increasingly carrying multiple disease-causing pathogens at once, raising the risk of co-infection in humans. In practical terms, that complexity means that a single tick bite can now expose a person to more than one illness at the same time. Rather than a single pathogen moving through a stable system, LaDeau’s work shows a more complex dynamic: tick populations shaped by climate conditions, host species diversity and changing landscapes, all interacting to influence disease transmission.
In the Hudson Valley, long-term studies have demonstrated how factors such as forest fragmentation, shifts in wildlife populations and warmer temperatures can alter the abundance and behavior of ticks and their hosts. White-footed mice, deer and other species play different roles in maintaining and spreading pathogens, meaning that changes in biodiversity can directly affect human disease risk.
Where Air and Water Meet
Together, these findings illustrate how environmental change can have immediate consequences for human health—and how understanding those risks requires looking beyond individual species to the systems in which they are embedded. Increasingly, that interconnectedness extends beyond research institutions into the communities themselves. At Bard College, Eli Dueker directs the Community Sciences Lab, which focuses on both water and air quality in the region. His work emphasizes the movement of pollutants across environmental boundaries. “What’s in the air is in the water, and what’s in the water is also in the air,” Dueker says, noting that environmental systems are often treated separately in policy and regulation, despite their interdependence.
Through initiatives such as the Hudson Valley Community Air Network, the lab is working to expand access to environmental data. The project deploys air quality sensors across the region, addressing gaps in monitoring infrastructure and providing residents with real-time information about local conditions. In many parts of the Hudson Valley, Dueker noted, such data has historically been limited or unavailable. “The data that you get often is air quality from the nearest major city,” he says. “For those of us who live in rural areas, that’s just not going to do it.”
This approach reflects a broader shift toward community-engaged science, in which research is conducted not only for public benefit but in collaboration with the public. Environmental data becomes a shared resource, informing both scientific understanding and local decision-making.
Mapping an Unequal Landscape
A similar integration of scientific analysis and community engagement can be seen in the work of Jordan Ayala at Bard College, where he is based in the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities. Ayala’s research combines geographic information systems (GIS), demographic data and participatory mapping to examine how environmental conditions are distributed across landscapes and populations.
His projects in the Hudson Valley include efforts to compile long-term datasets on water quality in the Sawkill watershed, as well as initiatives that involve residents in identifying environmental concerns related to air quality and land use. By combining technical data with local knowledge, Ayala aims to better understand how environmental systems intersect with social and economic factors.
When he looks at a map of the Hudson Valley, Ayala says, he sees not a single unified region but a patchwork of distinct conditions and experiences. “I see a bit of the housing crisis,” he says. “I see opportunities and challenges with respect to accessibility, connectivity and these microcosms that exist throughout the Hudson Valley.”
That perspective shapes his approach to environmental research. Rather than treating landscapes as uniform, Ayala focuses on how access to clean air, water and open space can vary widely from one community to another. His work seeks to connect large-scale environmental data with the lived realities of residents, highlighting how ecological conditions and social factors are often inseparable. “The way we talk about the ‘Hudson Valley’ can obscure local differences,” Ayala says. These methods represent an evolution in how natural systems are studied. Where earlier generations of naturalists focused on observation and description, contemporary researchers often rely on large datasets, modeling tools and collaborative frameworks to analyze complex systems.
Building a Refuge for Bats
At the same time, field-based observation remains essential. For bat biologist Amanda Bevan Zientek, the Hudson Valley’s agricultural landscapes have become a site for studying both ecological decline and resilience. As part of the Applied Farmscape Ecology Research Collaborative at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub in Hurley, Bevan Zientek studies tricolored bats, a once-common species that has experienced catastrophic population losses across the Northeast due to white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that disrupts bats’ winter hibernation cycles.
The disease forces bats to wake repeatedly from torpor, rapidly depleting the fat reserves they need to survive the winter. Since the fungus first appeared in the United States in 2007, some regional populations of tricolored bats have declined by more than 90 percent. “You would go into a cave and you could see several thousand of them,” Bevan Zientek says. “Now you’ll be lucky to see 10.”
Her work at the Farm Hub focuses on understanding how agricultural practices can support biodiversity rather than diminish it. While industrial agriculture is often associated with habitat loss, Bevan Zientek says farms can also provide valuable edge habitat, riparian corridors, and insect populations that support bats and other wildlife. The Farm Hub’s location near Esopus Creek, combined with its nonconventional farming practices, has made it a promising environment for the species. Bats play an important ecological role, consuming enormous quantities of insects, including agricultural pests and forest defoliators. Studies have estimated that bats save the US agricultural industry billions of dollars annually by suppressing pest populations. Tricolored bats are also considered what ecologists call an “umbrella species,” meaning that habitat protections designed for them can benefit multiple other bat species as well.
Increasingly, Bevan Zientek’s work extends beyond field research into outreach and collaboration with farmers themselves. Part of her current work involves developing surveys and public engagement efforts to better understand farmers’ attitudes toward bats and conservation practices. While many farmers recognize the ecological value of birds like swallows and purple martins, she said, the role bats play in supporting healthy farms is less widely understood.
Despite the scale of the population decline, Bevan Zientek remains cautiously hopeful. Some bats appear to be surviving white-nose syndrome and reproducing, raising the possibility of what scientists call “evolutionary rescue,” in which surviving individuals pass on traits that improve resilience to the disease. “If we can keep those individuals alive and help them keep reproducing,” she says, “hopefully evolutionary rescue will kick in.”
Reading the River’s Warning Signs
For Julian Damashek, who joined Riverkeeper in 2023 as a water quality scientist, the Hudson River itself continues to serve as a primary site of investigation. His work focuses on water quality, particularly the use of bacteria as indicators of contamination. Bacterial monitoring allows researchers to detect pollution that may not otherwise be visible. “You can go out to the river and it looks perfectly fine,” Damashek says, “but there’s some sort of contamination or pollution.”
That kind of monitoring has become increasingly important as environmental challenges shift from obvious sources to more complex and diffuse ones. Last summer, Damashek was part of a team studying a widespread harmful algal bloom in the Hudson River—an event that appeared not only in tributaries like Rondout Creek and the Sawkill, but across the main channel of the river itself, and persisted for weeks.
The bloom underscored how much remains uncertain about the system. Scientists understand some of the conditions that can trigger such events—nutrient runoff, warmer temperatures—but not why similar conditions produce dramatically different outcomes in different places. “Things get really complicated really fast,” Damashek says.
Even now, researchers are still analyzing data collected during the bloom to understand what drove it, and why the Hudson—often more resilient than other nutrient-rich estuaries—responded the way it did. “There’s a lot that we just don’t understand,” he says, describing the ongoing effort to piece together how biological, chemical and physical factors interact in the river.
The episode highlights the importance of sustained monitoring and long-term research. As environmental pressures become more spread out and interconnected, understanding them depends not only on individual observations, but on the accumulation of data over time.
This shift from identifiable point sources to distributed environmental pressures has made ecological research more complex. It has also increased the importance of interdisciplinary approaches that integrate data from multiple sources and scales. The Hudson Valley is now a key site for understanding how natural and human systems interact. Scientists at the Cary Institute, Bard College, Riverkeeper and other organizations frequently work across institutional boundaries, sharing data and expertise to address shared challenges. The same landscape that inspired early naturalists and later activists now supports a different kind of inquiry that has evolved from observation to advocacy to analysis, with each phase building on the last. Today’s scientists are part of that continuum, extending a legacy that has helped shape both regional identity and national environmental practice.
