portland

Janet Silbernagel: The Calling of the Cranes

Dr. Janet Silbernagel‘s personal and professional worlds collide in China, where cranes begin to stretch her perception of connections across landscapes. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Janet Silbernagel is a landscape ecologist with a design background, specializing in landscape conservation strategies, applying landscape ecological theory, scenario modeling, and geospatial analyses.  Silbernagel started her career as a landscape architect with the US. Forest Service before receiving her PhD in Forest Science from Michigan Technological University. Previously, Silbernagel served on the faculty of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Washington State University. She has been on the faculty at UW-Madison since 1999, where she directs the Professional Master’s program in Environmental Conservation within the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, designed to train conservation leaders internationally. Through these roles and her research, Dr. Silbernagel travels between the Great Lakes, Europe, and China.

Recently she has worked on scenarios of forest conservation effectiveness in a changing climate (with The Nature Conservancy); citizen engagement and spatial literacy in Great Lakes coastal communities (with NOAA Sea Grant); landscape connectivity of conservation subdivisions (in WI); and studies to understand dynamics of wetland systems for crane conservation in both China and Wisconsin (with the International Crane Foundation).

Aerin Jacob: Stuck in the Serengeti

Dr. Aerin Jacob recalls the three most valuable conservation lessons she ever learned…from a man with a machine gun. Listen below or stream the official podcast!

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Aerin Jacob, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and a Wilburforce Fellow in Conservation Science Fellow. Trained as an ecologist, she works to develop management strategies that incorporate local, Indigenous, and scientific knowledge to achieve conservation objectives while maintaining human well-being. She works with First Nations communities in British Columbia to study the environmental and socioeconomic outcomes of marine management in the Great Bear Rainforest. Aerin is also a member of the Sustainable Canada Dialogues, a network of scholars developing viable, science-based policy options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and guide sustainable development in Canada. Her previous work includes studies of land-use change, restoration ecology, and animal behaviour in East Africa and western North America. Aerin earned her PhD at McGill University and her BSc at the University of British Columbia.