The Forest School

Restoring Belize’s Landscapes

Ki’ila Salas ’19 MF returned to her home country of Belize to participate in its first landscape restoration initiative, helping to develop its National Landscape Restoration Strategy for the Belize Forest Department. The project is part of the country’s national restoration commitment to the Bonn Challenge, which has a global goal to bring 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes into restoration by 2030.

“The project gave me great pride and joy in guiding the process of how the restoration strategies should be accomplished,” says Salas.

Rehabilitating Ghana’s Forests

As the director of operations for Ghana’s Forestry Commission, Hugh Brown ’10 MF oversees the country’s commercial forest plantation development and land restoration. About 450,000 hectares are being rehabilitated under his guidance.

In 2020, Brown was given YSE’s Prospect Street Award, which recognizes a graduate of the last decade who has made a significant impact in their field. 

“Landscape restoration,’’ says Brown, “ is a team sport.”

Mapping Panama’s Sustainable Farmlands

A researcher for the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative, Cecilia Rogers ’22 MFS is mapping the success of ELTI’s Panama program that helps cattle ranchers incorporate sustainable practices, such as the use of forested pastureland, into their land management.

Working with fellow students, she found that the amount of sustainably managed farmland had significantly increased from 4% in 2011 to 66% in 2020.

Indigenous Restoration Approaches

As co-founder and executive director of Shelterwood, Nikola Alexandre ’18 MF, MBA leads the restoration of a 900-acre forest in Northern California with Black and Indigenous community approaches to land care.

His work creates partnerships with and between traditional conservation NGOs, Indigenous and racial justice organizations, government agencies, and private landowners to model socially just and ecologically sound pathways to protecting and restoring nature. In 2020, Alexandre was named a Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award candidate for his work.

Tracking Forest Inventory

Richard Guldin ’76 MFS, ’79 PhD has helped reinvent the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program by integrating new sampling designs, field procedures, and innovative software to create an annual inventory that has become a global model. His work earned him the Society of American Foresters’ Sir William Schlich Award.