Text by Paula Dittrick, TMNCPC blogmaster. Photos from TMNCPC library.
Jaime Gonzalez told the Texas Master Naturalist Coastal Prairie Chapter’s October meeting about his wide-ranging job as the Houston Resilient Cities Director for The Nature Conservancy of Texas (TNC).
“Cities are important to conservation values,” Gonzalez said. “They can be a real lab for innovation,” he said of using nature to help address urban issues.
He uses environmental education and TNC’s collaboration with other groups to tell the story of Houston’s rich biodiversity. Gonzalez organizes partnerships and manages projects to make Houston a cooler and healthier city for humans.
“If there’s no reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions, we can expect the average number of days with a ‘feels-like temperature’ above 105 degrees Fahrenheit to increase from 10 to 74 by 2065,” he said of the heat index.
Heat maps of various Houston neighborhoods are expected to be released later this year based upon information gathered by volunteers on a single day in August.
The information was gathered by Houston Harris County Heat Action Team (H3AT), a collaboration between TNC, Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) in The Woodlands, the city of Houston, and Harris County Public Health.
H3AT’s goal is to better understand heat distribution at different times of the day across Houston’s communities and the broader Harris County. Gonzalez also is identifying ecological connections between cities and rural areas.
Before joining TNC, Gonzalez worked on ecological restoration at the Katy Prairie Conservancy (KPC) where he served as Community Conservation Director. He specializes on prairie conservation, having helped create prairies such as the MD Anderson prairie in the Texas Medical Center. Prairies absorb water and help mitigate flooding, he said.
Before KPC, Gonzalez worked at the Houston Arboretum.