Critical Habitat is investigating the relationship between people and the environment in the American West at different spatial and temporal scales.

In "On the Wings of a Butterfly," Jon Christensen and Gabriel Shields-Estrada are examining the spatial history of ideas, narratives, science, and practices that have protected and imperiled a threatened species - the Bay checkerspot butterfly - in time and space in the hills around the San Francisco Bay Area.

In "Bay Area Conservation and Development," Carrie Denning and Jon Christensen are analyzing larger, regional land-use questions that affect the Bay Area and the increasingly suburbanized Central Valley, using a local case study of land conservation and urban development in Silicon Valley from World War II to the present.

In "Botanizing California," Moritz Sudhof and Jon Christensen are tracing the patterns of scientists and scientific practices that contributed to constructing our historical knowledge of California's ecosystems.

In "Conservation and Development in the American West," Melissa Runsten, Jon Christensen, and Amanda Cravens are looking at patterns of development and conservation together across the entire western United States, and in neighboring Canada and Mexico.

In "California Transect," Alex McInturff walked from Oakland, California, to Yosemite National Park, retracing a trek that John Muir made in 1868, and is constructing a narrative a spatial history of this transect across California's social and natural environment.

In "Conservation in a Changing World," Jon Christensen and Amanda Cravens are exploring a collaboration with the San Francisco Estuary Institute's Historical Ecology Program to bring historical understanding of changing environments into academic and public discussions about climate change.