Eric W. Sanderson

Eric Wayne Sanderson is an American landscape ecologist, who served as the inaugural director of the Mannahatta Project.

Quotes

Conservation biologists struggle to decide how many animals to save. In this article, I outline 18 approaches to setting population target levels (PTLs) for animals, with rules of thumb and analytical recommendations for each approach. Minimally viable populations, the most common target level, are necessary but not sufficient for most efforts, given the range of values that bear on conservation. Reference ecosystems, either extant or historical, are key for setting practical target levels. Setting PTLs sufficient for conserved populations to be animals in all respects (including functional, social, landscape, ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects) is a critical consensus point. In many cases densities as well as overall population size will need to be specified. I suggest a four-tiered system of setting incrementally higher population target levels such that conservation provides first for demographic sustainability, then ecological integrity, then sustainable use, and finally restoration of historical numbers of wildlife, based on times when human beings had less impact on the planet than we do today.
- (November 2006)"How Many Animals Do We Want to Save? The Many Ways of Setting Population Target Levels for Conservation". BioScience 56 (11): 911–922. DOI:10.1641/0006-3568(2006)56[911:HMADWW]2.0.CO;2.

On a hot, fair day, the twelfth of September, 1609, Henry Hudson and a small crew of Dutch and English sailors rode the flood tide up a great estuarine river, past a long, wooded island at latitude 40º 48' north, on the edge of the North American continent. Locally the island was called Mannahatta, or "Island of Many Hills." …
Mannahatta had more ecological communities per acre than Yellowstone, more native plant species per acre than Yosemite, and more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mannahatta housed wolves, black bears, mountain lions, beavers, mink, and river otters; whales, porpoises, seals, and the occasional sea turtle visited its harbor. Millions of birds of more than a hundred and fifty different species flew over the island annually on transcontinental migratory pathways; millions of fish—shad, herring, trout, sturgeon, and eel–swam past the island up the Hudson River and in its streams during annual rites of spring.
- "Chapter One. The Mannahatta Project". Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. Abrams. 2013. ISBN 1613125739. 1st part of quote 1st sentence of 2nd part of quote (1st edition 2007)

I came to the Bronx as an ecologist to work for the Wildlife Conservation Society (the Bronx Zoo's parent organization), a New York City cultivation institution with a century-long dedication to wildlife and wild places around the world. My task was to bring technical aspects of modern geography into its global mission to save tigers, elephants, whales, gorillas, and other charismatic megafauna ... More than most disciplines, ecology thrives on complexity, and ecology in the service of conservation (a subdiscipline called conservation biology) pulls one rapidly into the domains of economics, society, and politics.
- "Part I. The Siren Song. Chapter 1. How the Sirens Sing". Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs. Abrams. 2013. ISBN 1613125747.

When Sanderson wanders through Central Park, he's able to look beyond the half-million cubic yards of soil hauled in by its designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, to fill in what was mostly a swampy bog surrounded by poison oak and sumac. He can trace the shoreline of the long, narrow lake that lay along what is now 59th Street, north of the Plaza Hotel, with its tidal outlets that meandered through salt marsh to the East River. From the west, he can see a pair of streams entering the lake that drained the slope of Manhattan's major ridgeline, a deer mountain lion trail known today as Broadway.
- Alan Weisman, The World Without Us. Macmillan. 2007. p. 22. ISBN 0312347294.

Encyclopedic article on Eric W. Sanderson on Wikipedia
The Welikia Project
(July 10, 2023)"Nature Your City - Eric Sanderson - NYC EcoFlora". New York Botanical Garden, YouTube.