3rd CCC Fellows Cohort

Summary of 3rd Cohort of CCC Fellows (2011-2012)

The third cohort of CCC Fellows will be working in eight countries, including Colombia, Panama, Estonia, Kenya, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Tibet and the United States. Of the ten fellows who will be working in the United States, eight will be working in communities across Colorado from the Front Range to the Western Slope, one will be working in the state of Washington, one in the state of Wyoming, and one will be working to develop a strategy tool that potentially could be applied in many locations in the U.S. and around the world. The Fellows also represent six departments and two colleges at Colorado State University, three NGOs doing conservation work in Colorado, an NGO in Washington State, and a local ranch.

The new fellows will be working on problems as diverse as studying the environmental governability practices of marginalized ethnic populations in Colombia; to studying stakeholder perceptions of conservation and creating collaborative partnerships between people and national parks in Colorado and Tanzania; to studying home gardens and cross-border exchanges of knowledge and resources as a way to promote food sovereignty while mitigating impacts of climate change in northern Nicaragua; to finding ways to spread culturally relevant knowledge of predicted climate changes in rural Tibet to inform local resource conservation and livelihood strategies.

	David Bartecchi David is the Executive Director of Village Earth, an NGO based in Fort Collins, Colorado. Through this fellowship, David will research and develop a practical model for supporting local community-based natural resource conservation organizations. The goal is to operationalize many of the key findings in the literature on best practices for supporting local organizational capacity building. The outcome of this fellowship will be a practical and adaptive model for supporting local community-based organizations that could be utilized by the CCC itself or in partnership with Village Earth.
	Karie Boone Karie is a master’s student in the Department of Sociology, CSU who works with Dr. Pete Taylor. In collaboration with Nicaraguan community leaders, NGOs and US academics, Karie will explore ways in which mutually beneficial relationships across borders may be structured to develop sustainable networks of collaborative conservation. She will focus on home gardens to analyze and promote greater food sovereignty while mitigating the impacts of climate change in the Segovias region of Nicaragua. Through case studies of local farms, she will produce a manual for locals to enhance their food security through bio-diverse gardening practices.
	Gillian Bowser Gillian is a research scientist with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory in the Warner College of Natural Resources at CSU. By using participant generated imagery, Gillian and a pair of CCC graduate fellows (Kate Wilkins and Gloria Sumay) will explore perceptions of conflict over wildlife, tourism and sustainable development between communities and protected areas for two different national parks: Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado USA and Tarangire National Park, Tanzania. Gillian’s primary role in the joint project will be to engage Park management and community leaders in a conversation exchange about conflict and bridging the community-Park gap, both within and between locations. The project will end with a joint workshop at Tarangire between senior managers and community leaders.
	Jessica Clement Jessica is a social scientist and forest ecologist who co-directs the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute (CFRI) of the Department of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship, CSU. With Michael Schrotz, the Planning and Lands Staff Officer of Bridger-Teton National Forest (BTNF), Wyoming, and Tony Cheng, the Director of CFRI, Jessica will explore methods to effectively integrate social science to benefit collaborative, large landscape-scale planning and conservation processes. She will describe methods for utilizing various types of social science data to enhance long-term collaborative planning and conservation to benefit cultural, economic and ecological components of landscape conservation on the BTNF.
	Stuart Cottrell Stuart is an associate professor in the Human Dimensions of Natural Resources Department at CSU. He will work with Vilsandi National Park (VNP) and other protected area stakeholders on Saaremaa Island, Estonia to facilitate development of a collaborative conservation plan coupled with visitor management and sustainable tourism development strategies for VNP to meet criteria to become a European Protected Area Network Park (PAN). The goal of the fellowship is to enhance VNP and stakeholder capacity to manage conservation collaboratively, to enhance sustainable livelihoods among tour operators, and to enhance the wilderness experience of visitors.
	Emily Eddins Emily is a PhD candidate in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at CSU, working with Dr. Stuart Cottrell. Emily will conduct an integrated assessment of the impacts of volunteer tourism on local communities’ sustainable livelihoods and cross-cultural collaboration in an area that has a current, long-standing partnership within volunteer tourism through CSU's Alternative Break program in Achiote, Panama. She aims to better understand the role that volunteer tourism can play in collaborative conservation efforts and to promote and enhance collaboration among volunteer tourism stakeholders to better identify, implement, and manage projects that maximize benefits for the daily lives of people in host communities and their surrounding ecological systems.
	Lindsay Ex Lindsay is an Environmental Planner with the City of Fort Collins, Colorado, and is the Research Coordinator for the Conservation Development Global Challenges Research Team (GCRT) at Colorado State University’s School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES). She will develop an outreach network for conservation development (CD) that will engage practitioners that are already involved in CD and enable communication of the approach across a broader range of stakeholders, including planners, developers, homeowners associations, and advocacy groups such as local land trusts. Through this fellowship, Lindsay and the CD GCRT will pilot a website to serve as the portal for CD practice in Colorado, eventually launching this portal and network to a national level.
	Rachel Gibson Rachel is a master’s student working with Dr. Jennifer Cross in CSU’s Department of Sociology. She will examine what has motivated Fort Collins residents to get involved in FortZED, a community initiative to reduce city-wide energy use through conservation practices and the use of renewable energy sources. She will also examine the success of strategies aimed at getting people to curb their energy use. Through a collaborative project involving Colorado State University, the CCC, The Atmosphere Conservancy, and other community members, she will be able to examine this very unique community initiative, which will help reduce energy use and provide for a better, more environmentally-friendly future.
	Sarah Hamman Sarah is a restoration ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, Washington, and an alumna of Colorado State University. She will work with CSU affiliates and multiple stakeholders to launch a Prescribed Fire Council in the state of Washington. The fellowship will support the planning and implementation of a two-day facilitated workshop that will bring together diverse participants from government fire management agencies, non-profit conservation organizations and private landowners to address the social and ecological challenges to prescribed burning. This project will encourage fire suppression organizations to consider more prescribed burning, collaborative wildfire management and building ecosystem resilience to altered fire regimes.
	Kelly Hopping Kelly is a PhD student in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology and is advised by Dr. Julia Klein. She will work in a Tibetan pastoralist community, where she will integrate local knowledge about climate change with satellite imagery of vegetation health and data from newly developed climate models. With increased understanding of how environmental knowledge is held and shared within the community, she will be able to work with village leaders to spread predictions about climate change and its consequences for this social-ecosystem system more effectively.
	David Jessup David is co-owner of Sylvan Dale Ranch, a 3500-acre working dude ranch west of Loveland that raises grass-fed beef for local sale. David’s fellowship will allow him to test two soil restoration strategies, mob grazing and compost tea application, on an irrigated hay field where decades of hay removal has depleted the soil. Working with university and government collaborators, he will measure changes in soil quality indices and analyze the potential value of these improvements for a ranchland ecosystem services market for Colorado and the U.S. West. His report will be applicable to soil restoration, conservation and grazing land management for private and public lands.
	Clement Lenachuru Clement is a PhD student in CSU’s Department of Forest, Rangeland and Watershed Stewardship advised by Dr. Maria Fernandez-Gimenez. His project in Marigat district in Kenya will bring together governmental departments, NGOs, county administrative officers, local community-based organizations, and local farmers to restore pastures and farmlands that have been invaded by an exotic weed - prosopis juliflora. He will work closely with collaborative partners and farmers to increase the land’s productivity and suitability for raising livestock and crops to improve food security in this arid part of Kenya, and will build and utilize existing local social networks and climatic knowledge to conserve the environment and its productivity.
	Katie Lyon Katie is a PhD student in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University, working with Dr. Jerry Vaske. Katie’s research will focus on identifying practical steps for reducing the social and cognitive barriers to implementing firewise defensible space behaviors in Colorado. For her fellowship, Katie will conduct a series of participatory workshops with fire managers and individual and community stakeholders to obtain feedback on communication strategies for promoting firewise behaviors at an individual and neighborhood level.
	Sarah Reed Sarah is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology, CSU. She will collaborate with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to develop a citizen science protocol for monitoring mammal habitat use and movement patterns on private lands. A CSU student research assistant will help test and refine this protocol in a pilot field comparison of snow tracking and remote camera surveys in a local mountain subdivision. The resulting protocol will be leveraged for application to the pilot study area, and WCS conservation priority landscapes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and Adirondack Park.
	Karen Snider Karen is the Director of the Sustainable Development Garden, CSU’s organic student-run garden. Her fellowship will highlight local resource conservation and individual empowerment through urban community building. Projects such as a tool co-op and lending library, a free store, and a community garden will encourage participants to create more self-reliant and sustainable lifestyles within their city. She will provide a localized model for urban conservation through sustainable community development, as well as document a budding grassroots movement occurring within multiple cities that she will share with the global conservation community via a documentary film on collaborative living in urban spaces.
	Gloria Sumay Gloria is a master’s student in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU, working with Dr. Gillian Bowser. Her project addresses the cross-cultural perspectives of local communities neighboring national parks on migratory animals and park management. Gloria will work with three villages to the east of Tarangire National Park, Tanzania, where there is a long history of conflict between the Park and local communities. She will use household interviews, Photovoice, and GIS to identify and locate conflicts. Through her fellowship she will produce maps and will hold meetings between communities and Park management.
	Marcela Velasco Marcela is on the faculty of the Department of Political Science, CSU. She will research the environmental governability practices of marginalized ethnic populations in Colombia, and will encourage training and field exchanges between an indigenous group recovering 1,300 hectares of deforested land in Cristianía (Antioquia) and a riparian Afro-Colombian community trying to protect its river in Anchicayá (Valle). Her fellowship project will support Jenzera, an inter- ethnic and multidisciplinary organization developing training activities aimed at increasing ethno- territorial governance by addressing issues of conflict over land and natural resources. Click here to see an article about Marcela's fellowship in Anchicayá, Colombia. Click here to see a report about lessons learned from the exchange between representatives from the territories of Anchicayá and Karmata Rua in Columbia.
	Kate Wilkins Kate is a master’s student working with Dr. Gillian Bowser in the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU. Her Fellowship project involves using interviews and Photovoice to understand local community attitudes toward Great Sand Dunes National Park of Colorado. Kate will collaborate with Gloria Sumay to compare Crestone’s perceptions of the park with those of communities near Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. Together with their advisor, Faculty Fellow Dr. Gillian Bowser, Kate and Gloria will organize a meeting for Great Sand Dunes participants to share pictures and stories with Park management, and a Photovoice exhibit at CSU.