About Jenny
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Hi! I’m Jennifer Walker with Sensible Science, here to tell you a little about myself.
I’ll start with my education. I earned Bachelor of Science in Range Management from New Mexico State University in 1990, and then did things other than school for a long time. I’ll talk about that in a minute. I did end up going back to school at an advanced age though, and earned a Master of Natural Resources from the University of Idaho in 2011, and then a PhD in Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2016.
Now for work. I’ve had a couple of parallel careers running in my life, that I think have given me some valuable perspective on the things Sensible Science touches on. The longest-running of these is farming. My husband and I started farming crops and livestock in western South Dakota in 1993. We have raised all three of our kids on the farm, and have worked hard to build it into a successful business, while also taking good care of the land, water and wildlife that make up the landscape. During the decades since then, I spent a little over 10 years teaching Middle School science. I headed to graduate school in 2009, and at about the same time found myself with a federal job as a Rangeland Management technician with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). I worked my way through both graduate degrees as an intern with the BLM, leading to the fascinating job of Geospatial Ecologist. And now, along with the farm and Sensible Science, I am a Research Scientist with South Dakota Mines.
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During my time with BLM, my focus was on collecting and using high-quality data of various kinds to understand the health of landscapes and ecosystems, and how they respond to management actions and other influences. One type of data I was involved with was field observation: For several years I ran crews out across the landscape to collect very specific types of data about soils, plants, etc., and then I managed and analyzed that data. Other types of data included information from a system of high-tech ground-based sensors deployed across the landscape, that record rainfall, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, and several other types of information. We also used remotely sensed data from satellites such as LandSat and MODIS, which can tell you all sorts of interesting things. All of these types of data and observations work together to form a picture of the processes playing out on the lands we managed.
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In these educational and professional activities, as well as in daily life, I have been face-to-face with the realities of climate change and other environmental issues on a nitty-gritty, daily basis. I see things that have the potential to impact people in hugely important ways, and I want to help people understand those things so that they can protect what matters to them. That is what Sensible Science is all about.
