A summary of research published by Conservation International and others which address how climate change will impact the world’s coffee supply.
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Auditing the Forest Restoration Monitoring System for the Bonn Challenge - A final look
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In 2011, the government of Rwanda made an ambitious commitment of 2 million hectares to The Bonn Challenge. While significant progress has been made in achieving this goal, the commitment faces the risk of not being able to demonstrate progress or impact if a flexible and customizable monitoring system isn’t availed.
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On the challenges of monitoring seedling survival
A couple weeks ago I found myself assigned to the role of professional photographer as my team and I navigated through the eastern and northern provinces of Rwanda. We were meeting up with our field leads to test a monitoring strategy. The strategy aims to capture tree seedling survival rates and was at the stage which required a field test. This field visit was not directly related to my project but provided key insight into the reforestation projects IUCN is supporting in Rwanda and gave me some indication of the monitoring challenges faced by the field staff internal and external to IUCN.
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In this week’s post I present my project’s context and a few reflections on my work here in Rwanda. In my next post, I am excited to reflect on some of the agroforestry and forestry interventions IUCN is undertaking here in Rwanda. I don’t have that many photos which are directly relevant to my project, but I did include a few pictures from my retreat to Lake Kivu last weekend. Oh and there’s a short blurb about my serendipitous path to becoming a (partial) marathon runner.
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Rwanda is nothing like I imagined it to be. While planning my capstone project with IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), very few people I knew had much experience in this country, or the region, and I knew better than to try to anticipate a lot.
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Comparison of C2 and B2 inundation scenarios and identification of areas of high social vulnerability.
Course assignment
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Carmen is an adult female lion that was tracked hourly from September 2005 to April 2006. I utilized arcGIS to analyze whether Carmen’s movements were clustered between bomas (village sites) and major roads in mid-level elevations. I also tested several hypotheses about Carmen’s body temperature in correlation to her surroundings.
Course assignment
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Course assignment
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The Brown-winged owl is a sensitive species which was found to be nesting on the Windfall Trails property this year. Governmental policies state that to protect habitat of this particular sensitive species, timber harvesting must not occur within a 10-hectare (ha) buffer of known nesting locations unless population densities exceed and remain above threshold levels. Utilized ArcGIS technology to assess several impacts of this policy.
Course assignment
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In 2017, ICF and EWT collaborated with University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute to draft a conservation management plan that brings forth new ideas, re-imagines ICF and EWT’s existing conservation plan in alignment with the Open Standards, and inputs the new plan into Miradi to be shared widely across both organizations.
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Speak Loudly for Quiet Places: An Examination of Land Use Policy and the Mitigation of Acid Mine Drainage in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Watershed
“Why do I ramble, you ask. It is in defense of the quiet places, the primitive voices only found in snowfall, the words only spoken around fires between cactus and lost ocean. Since it is in their nature to be quiet, we must make noise for these places everywhere, defending them on all fronts, for as we lose wildness, we lose vitality.” -- Ben Weaver
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Escalating human-elephant conflicts due to increasing habitat fragmentation and human population growth in Africa remains one of the greatest unresolved challenges for conservation.
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13 years ago, Kate and Dan Marsiglio bought a small parcel of land in the New York Catskills where they endeavored to create a humble life in sustainable farming, a decision which intricately tied their lives to the health and wellness of 9 million New York City residents.
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The following is an essay I wrote in response to a course assignment. The assignment was to attend an environment-focused public committee meeting and analyze the communication techniques employed during the meeting.
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This course covered the principles and fundamentals of GPS and the use of GPS units in the field for graduate students. Lecture topics focused on GPS/GNSS system principles, fundamentals, operations and techniques to improve accuracy.
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A video I put together after my trip to Thailand :)
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June 2016 Self Composed Update: A probono project collaboration with SFMOMA I worked on for over a year at Adobe finally came to life. Check out the Adobe Communications article 'Self Composed: Rethinking the Selfie at SMOMA.' The experience even made Curbed's '10 things not to miss at the new SFMOMA'.
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I love gardening because I savor the ability to learn by doing and I enjoy being outside were the unpredictability of factors like weather can leave all your previous planning in the dust. I love the endless amount of research and information available and digestible by the average gardener but also the complex and specific research tailored to your local environment and conditions. The research is endless and it seems that every hour of research fruits into another lush tomato or watermelon. I also just like watching the plants grow day after day: reaching for the sun, adding more foliage, flowering, growing fruit and then wilting and drying into fodder for the next year's crop.
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