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,” Salas says.

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.

Rehabilitating Ghana’s Forests

After a decade as director of operations for Ghana’s Forestry Commission, overseeing the country’s commercial forest plantation development and land restoration, Hugh Brown ’10 MF was named executive director of the Commission's Forest Services Division in 2022.

The Commission has begun the restoration of more than 450,000 hectares of degraded forests and planted millions of new trees under Brown's leadership — part of a major reforestation initiative by the Ghanaian government to contribute to global climate action.

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.

Preserving and Restoring Urban Forests

Sarah Charlop-Powers ’09 MEM is helping to preserve and restore critical urban forests in New York City and beyond. In 2012, she helped launch the Natural Areas Conservancy (NAC), which has partnered with NYC Parks to create the innovative Forest Management Framework that conducted field-based ecological assessments in the city. Its efforts recently expanded with a national survey distributed to 125 cities and organizations across the U.S. aimed at gaining a better understanding of how urban forests and natural areas are being managed.