The Evolving Appalachia Project is an experiment in regional science outreach from Southwest Virginia CSI, a science education initiative coordinated through Dr. Walter Smith and students at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. The concept behind this project is to provide an online home to feature and condense real-world examples of evolutionary processes in action in the Appalachian Mountain region. The roots for this site stem from an existing, successful smartphone app harnessing public lands as educational tools in Appalachia and a popular, now-defunct segment on our lab’s main website. Roughly once per month, we will feature an organism or ecosystem that exemplifies evolutionary or ecological processes in action from across the southern Appalachian Highlands.
The core of the project is a place-based platform hosted by MapBox, embedded below. You can either browse this map for locations or search for posts near your present location using the search bar (magnifying glass) at the top left of the map. Articles and guides are linked from this map or, alternatively, can be accessed using the directories in the bottom sidebar. For more info on this project, please see our “about” page.
