Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Healing and Meditative Landscape | Page 13

David Morimoto, Ph.D., is no stranger to the
Boston area’s historic cemeteries and has a longtime
appreciation of them as a source of green space in urban
areas. Morimoto, who is Associate Professor of Biology
and Director of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Natural Science and Mathematics Division at Lesley
University, says, “I grew up in a neighborhood surrounded
by cemeteries. They used to sell hot dogs on my street on
Memorial Day because there were so many! And Forest
Hills Cemetery was my nature getaway.” Today, he brings
that appreciation to Mount Auburn in our two-year
wildlife research and education partnership with Lesley,
preparing to serve as our Educator-in-Residence in 2018.
Morimoto is already making plans to build upon this year’s
progress and contribute to the increasingly important field
of urban ecology.
“It’s a very timely partnership of a higher education in-
stitute with a unique place like Mount Auburn Cemetery,”
says Morimoto, “because Mount Auburn was driven by this
vision of having a spac e for people to escape and contem-
plate life and get some relief from the busy, active life of
the city. That’s even more important today with over half
the people in the world now living in cities.” His plans for
the partnership are centered on “trying to understand the
urban ecology of this place.” Groups of Lesley students will
come to Mount Auburn to engage with researchers and
our citizen-science programs and to learn more about our
urban oasis. Lesley staff will continue their ongoing data
collection on insect pollination, ants, birds, and bats, and
recruit naturalists to survey areas and species that have not
yet been examined.
Morimoto will collect the data, along with informa-
tion we already have, to create a biodiversity map of the
Cemetery. The long-term plan is to engage people in
monitoring and to put the data to use in future stud-
ies. “Urban ecology is still a really young science, so for
anything that we find, there’s any number of studies we
can do,” Morimoto explains. Areas of focus may include
enlisting the public in citizen science, monitoring the
impacts of climate change, and examining trends in sound,
microclimate, and air quality and how they affect wildlife.
Morimoto’s goal is for the partnership to become a
useful model for connecting the public with nature, and,
on a larger level, the importance of incorporating green
spaces into urban design. He is particularly excited for
the opportunity to increase awareness of the benefits that
places like Mount Auburn offer: “I think that this is really
important for us to reconnect to the land, because it does
wonders for our individual health and public health in
general at the community level, and Mount Auburn is a
tremendous resource with incredible diversity of trees and
lots of wildlife, so it’s the perfect opportunity to engage the
public in getting back to our roots.”
On a personal level, Morimoto is excited that the
educational side of the partnership gives young people
more opportunities to learn ecology first-hand, something
he wishes he had been more aware of during the time he
spent in Forest Hills as a child. “I learned natural history
late…it wasn’t until graduate school that I realized all those
experiences were part of my training to be a naturalist, and
I had missed all those years. So I want to help make this
program something that doesn’t let anyone else slip into
the spaces in between; they can actually have this as a real
important part of their development.”
(Above left) David Morimoto, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology and Director of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
at Lesley University, will serve as the 2018 A. J. & M. D. Ruggiero Memorial Trust Educator-in-Residence at Mount Auburn
Cemetery. (Above right) Education programs for local students and their families are bringing to life the data that Lesley
University researchers have been collecting.
2018 Volume 1 | 11