Read about the doings of these selected Round River Alumni; Tripp Burwell, Colin Peacock and Jean Polfus.

Tripp Burwell

How Round River Helped Me

Fall 2007 Semester- Namibia

2009-2010 Compton Mentor Fellow

Growing up in North Carolina, wild places and animals fascinated me. I loved playing in the woods, traveling to the mountains, and watching PBS Nature specials. When it came time to go to college, I chose Middlebury College in Vermont for its proximity to the mountains as much as anything else.

During a winter camping trip during my freshman year in nearby Smuggler’s Notch, one of my bagpiping buddies regaled us with stories of tracking rhinos and all kinds of other up-close wildlife encounters in the Namibian desert while on a Round River program. I decided then and there that when I got ready to study abroad my junior year, I would apply for Round River’s Namibia program. A chance to live in a tent in a desert in Africa and see awesome animals for 3 months? How could I pass this up?

My Round River experience proved more fruitful than I could have ever imagined. On a basic level, it supplied me with all the wild I could have hoped for. However it also helped me determine that conservation was a career goal that I wanted to pursue. Part of this realization stemmed from Round River’s innovative approach to conservation. In its work all across the globe, Round River has sought to engage local community members (who are often indigenous) in conservation efforts. It may make intuitive sense to involve local people who might be affected by conservation efforts in the planning, decision-making, and benefits of these same efforts. This tactic, however, has been employed only rarely across the broad spectrum of conservation. Round River, however, has made it a worthwhile emphasis of its excellent program.

During my semester abroad in Namibia, I was part of a community mapping project that looked to empower both Damara and Oshiwambo people in conversations with the national government by developing land-use maps with members of both groups. These maps allowed the Damaras and Oshiwambo to identify areas that they use for livestock grazing and areas in which they focus their Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM). In other words, the maps functioned as a method to organize the local knowledge of these groups into a format that could be made accessible to government land managers. As the Namibian government tries to re-connect Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Parks through the Damara and Oshiwambo territories, the Damaras and Oshiwambo can use these maps to outline their current land-use to facilitate discussion with the national government and to establish their position in such a discussion.

I found working with the local Namibians as cool as observing and recording information about lots of oryx, rhinos, springbok, giraffes, and elephants, to name a few. The Namibians were almost universally happy to talk with us and harbored a strong belief that we could help them. They knew that Round River was trying to listen to them and was trying to help them by making sure that conservation efforts took their voices into account. From these conversations, I gained a lot of respect for the local knowledge of the Damara and Oshiwambo, who were continuously examining and dealing with the movements of animals in the area. I particularly admired how some of them, including many former poachers, had translated their hunting skills into conservation skills in working to monitor highly endangered black rhinos with Save the Rhino Trust, a partner organization of Round River. These innovative techniques of incorporating the local people in conservation struck me as profoundly correct, as the way conservation should be done. Whenever I have studied, considered, or worked on a conservation project since my Round River experience, I have considered the effect of the project on the local people. In addition to this insight into the proper method of conservation, Round River gave me the necessary field experience to land other jobs in conservation.

Other field work I have done, conducting prey necropsies (cause of death analyses) and radio telemetry for the Wolf Project in the Greater Yellowstone Area in the summer of 2008 (a position I landed because of my Round River experience), illustrated (in a different way) the importance of connecting science to communities. The project attempted to assess wolf prey selection to provide management information for ranchers. While indigenous people in Namibia were happy for our help, Wyoming ranchers did not believe we could help them. Years of network building between Wyoming Game and Fish and local ranchers were necessary before such a project could be suggested. Still, some ranchers maintained at best an apathetic and at worst an antagonistic relationship towards researchers despite our best efforts to foster friendship and cooperation. In most cases, they felt that wolves represented a constant burden to their livelihoods and that more information about wolves would not help reduce the vulnerability of their cattle and elk stock. I believe that this work probably would have been met with less opposition had ranchers been asked how they felt research might benefit them and had they been incorporated in research design. This would have been more in keeping with the community involvement I participated in with Round River. Science, particularly in the United States, needs to forge better relationships between scientists and local communities.

Comparing my Round River experience with that of the Wolf Project, I was able to design a project in which I would cooperate with the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC) to attempt to design field climate-change related research projects with Native Iñupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska. Similarly to the Damaras and Oshiwambo, the Iñupiat Eskimos have a great deal of local knowledge about the ecosystem since they hunt many different types of animals within it. This knowledge, however, tends to be general and holistic, meaning that it does not translate easily to traditional notions of scientific rigor, which tend to be narrow and supported by meticulously recorded data. These two types of knowledge are not incompatible, however, and if cooperation occurs in research design, they can both benefit each other.

Traditionally (and globally), however, scientific projects have been designed by solely researchers with advanced degrees who spend considerably less time living in and studying a given ecosystem than the local people. Conversely, by designing field projects with the Iñupiat, I hope to both benefit the Iñupiat, by showing them that scientists could and wanted to help them answer questions the Iñupiat had about the ecosystem, and to benefit sciencists by nudging it into a greater consideration and valuation of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge of local people such as the Damaras, the Oshiwambo, and the Iñupiat. For this project design, I was awarded a Compton Mentor Fellowship, which provides funding of $35,000 for one year of post-collegiate work on a self-designed project. Round River not only gave me the necessary background to speak intelligently on this issue, but its progressive approach to involving local, and particularly indigenous, people in conservation had sparked my interest in spreading this form of conservation to other parts of the world.

Colin Peacock

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

November 25, 2009

Colin Peacock, of Tucson, uses Clark fellowship to study how climate change affects grizzly bear food supply

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Findings help convince Federal Judge to order grizzly relisting

WORCESTER, Mass. – Colin S. Peacock of Tucson, Ariz., was one of 11 Clark University undergraduates who was awarded a Steinbrecher Fellowship to support his creative research project this summer and throughout the 2009-2010 academic year.

Peacock is using his Steinbrecher Fellowship to study climate change and its effects on grizzly bear food sources. He spent the month of August in the Wind Rivers Mountain Range of central western Wyoming, a place he describes as “the highest, coldest, and most remote place you can find in the lower forty-eight United States.”

Peacock braved motion sickness as he flew around in small, ultra-light airplanes photographing the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. He hiked into high-elevation areas to observe and record the extent and area damaged by pine beetles and Pikas (small dwelling rodents), dodging thunderstorms along the way.  To further his overall goal of creating habitat linkages for grizzlies between Yellowstone Park and The Wind Rivers, Peacock put together GIS maps of pine beetle deforestation in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He also made connections with a nearby Indian reservation and the communities within about the possibility of having a student program in the area.

The idea for his project came when the student and his girlfriend were hypothesizing what they could do for a summer project that would “inspire, educate, and be valuable for us and the world,” wrote Peacock.  “And if our interest is the conservation of wild places (and it most certainly is), then what better area to conserve than one in our own backyard that might hold in it the last best hope for the grizzly in the lower 48 states?”

Peacock said, “It was a completely unexpectedly amazing summer. Flying over glaciers, grizzlies and some of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world is an experience unlike any other.”

Peacock’s research has already made a difference.  In September, a federal judge in Montana restored protection for an estimated 600 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. Peacock’s research on the extent of white bark pine mortality in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem helped influence this decision.

Peacock is passionate about conservation.  He worked for a year with the Round River Conservation Studies in Namibia studying Black Rhino and Cheetah populations and spent last year working as an instructor to college students in Canada, teaching wilderness survival skills.

“In my own personal experience, nothing is more efficacious and worthwhile than students working with native peoples to conserve the land that they have traditionally lived on,” he wrote.

Peacock has seemingly always had an interest in nature and wild places. He said much of his life “has been spent in a large extent, exploring wild places, camping and hiking to where there are no people.” His father, Doug Peacock, spent a great deal of time filming and living among grizzlies after returning from Vietnam.

Parminder Bhachu, professor of sociology at Clark, wrote that Peacock “makes Clark proud through his high level of expertise and commitment to wilderness preservation…. He is a genuine commited environmentalist who has been trained for his métier since childhood.”

Susan Foster, professor and chair of Clark’s Biology Department wrote that Peacock’s project “is [one] that will make a major difference in a changing world.”

Peacock is a member of the Class of 2010 at Clark; he majors in conservation biology.  He is a member of Campus Accountability Now!, a student organization that aims to hold the Clark community accountable to the global community. Peacock is the son of Doug Peacock of Livingston, MT and Lisa Peacock of Tucson, Ariz.  He attended Green Fields Country Day School and received his GED in 2003.

Steinbrecher Fellowships encourage and support Clark undergraduates in their pursuit of original ideas, creative research, and community service projects.  The Fellowship Program, established in 2006 in memory of David C. Steinbrecher, class of ’81, by his parents, Phyllis and Stephen Steinbrecher, class of ’55, is funded by generous gifts from them and from other family members and friends of David.  It is directed by Professor Sharon Krefetz, former Dean of the College and chair of Clark’s Department of Government and International Relations.

“The Steinbrecher Fellowship Program enables our students to pursue their passions and to engage in innovative research or much-appreciated community service.  I am enormously grateful to the Steinbrecher family for making this possible,” said Krefetz.

Clark University is a private, co-educational liberal-arts research university with more than 2,200 undergraduate and 900 graduate students. Since its founding in 1887 as the first all-graduate school in the United States, Clark has challenged convention with innovative programs such as the International Studies Stream, the Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the accelerated BA/MA programs with the fifth year tuition-free for eligible students. The University is featured in Loren Pope’s book, “Colleges That Change Lives.”

-www.clarku.edu-

Angela M. Bazydlo

Associate Director of Media Relations

Clark University

Marketing and Communications

ph: 508-793-7635

cell: 508-365-8736

www.clarku.edu

Jean Polfus

M.Sc. Wildlife Biology, University of Montana ‘10

Dartmouth College Alum ‘06

Round River Taku Alum ’06

On August 6^th 2006 I saw my first woodland caribou. After spending the summer in the vast wilderness of northern British Columbia, and the week earlier ground-truthing satellite data of woodland caribou wintering habitats, I finally felt the presence of the elusive ungulates. My fellow Round River students and I, along with Kim Heinemeyer and Chris Lockhart had just climbed Ruby Mountain, an ancient red volcano in the core of caribou habitat. As we hiked up the shoulder, we set loose tumults of loose volcanic rock. As we looked out across the landscape purple grey haze shrouded the mountains as sheets of rain created striations in the distance. When we reached the grassy bowl of the caldera we could see all the way to the Llewellyn glacier that feeds into Atlin Lake. We walked along the lip, pausing to peer through our binoculars. Kim had mentioned that caribou are very hard to see in the alpine because their molting brown coats blend so well with the fescue and heather tundra; often the only place to see them is on snow patches. As I scanned the hills the image of four caribou laying and standing on a patch of snow suddenly materialized before me. We hiked up to the highest point and then over and across a ridge so we could get a better look at them. Kneeling on a grassy knob and we watched them move out over the tundra feeding. They never once looked up at us. Chris spotted six more, far away in the distance.

When I left Atlin and British Columbia that summer I just couldn’t shake the image of caribou on snow. To be honest, I would have been thrilled to return to Atlin for any reason, but when Kim helped me develop a masters project in collaboration with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation (TRTFN) and Round River Conservation Studies, with the aim of developing a suite of products to support management of the Atlin herd of the northern mountain caribou, I was ecstatic. Through this collaboration I am taking classes at the University of Montana and am working closely with Dr. Mark Hebblewhite, professor of ungulate habitat ecology. The Atlin herd has been stable or declining for years, but the underlying cause remains undetermined and little information is available on the current habitat, ecological, or human impacts that may be influencing the herd. The goal of my research is to provide information about the habitat selection of woodland caribou to aid the TRTFN in successful and sustainable management. I hope to help direct management efforts to protect critical habitat of the Atlin woodland caribou herd before large-scale mining takes place (such as a proposed Molybdenum mine near Ruby Mountain). The project gives us the unique ability to analyze the question of why and how human use drives caribou dynamics through an updated landcover classification, resource selection function modeling, and cumulative effects assessment.

I have just returned to Montana after spending my third summer in BC conducting field work. I feel privileged to have seen many more caribou and to be a part of a masters project that has the potential to have real world implications. Our work has resulted in a new landcover classification that will replace existing low quality classifications and improve our ability to accurately model caribou habitat selection. During the coming year we will develop resource selection function (RSF) models with data from GPS and VHF collars that were deployed by the BC Ministry of Environment in 2000. The RSF models will allow us to identify important seasonal caribou habitat and compare predictions of habitat selection with habitat models that were developed with the traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge (TEK) of the TRTFN. This work will assist the TRTFN land and wildlife managers to understand the current status of key habitats and assess any potential future habitat impacts to the Atlin herd. Finally, results from this project have the potential to guide conservation efforts within the TRTFN territory for not only caribou, but a suite of other animals including moose, Stone’s sheep, mountain goats and grizzly bears.