For her fellowship, she used a sustainable livelihoods framework as a conceptual and interpretive lens to explore a long-term, cross-cultural partnership in volunteer tourism  for ecotourism development in rural Achiote, Panama through CSU’s Alternative Break program. She explored the role that volunteer tourism can play in collaborative conservation efforts to promote and enhance collaboration among volunteer tourism stakeholders to better identify, implement, and manage projects that maximize benefits of the daily lives of people in rural host communities and their surrounding ecological systems. Today, she is creating and developing university-community partnerships for service learning as the Assistant Director for Service Learning at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

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.

In collaboration with Nicaraguan community leaders, NGOs and US academics, Karie explored ways in which mutually beneficial relationships across borders may be structured to develop sustainable networks of collaborative conservation. She focused 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.

Her Fellowship project involved 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.

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.

She will work in a Tibetan pastoralist community, where she will integrate local knowledge about climate change with satellite imagery of vegetation health. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He worked 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 was 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.

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.

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.

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.

She worked with CSU affiliates and multiple stakeholders to launch a Prescribed Fire Council in the state of Washington. The fellowship supported the planning and implementation of a two-day facilitated workshop that brought 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. The project was to encourage fire suppression organizations to consider more prescribed burning, collaborative wildfire management and building ecosystem resilience to altered fire regimes.