Alex focused his summer on two projects with the National Forest Foundation (NFF). With half his time, Alex conducted a stakeholder assessment and developing outreach materials to better understand and engage with landowners and water rights holders around restoring the natural processes of headwater streams in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. While the summer’s focus was on several planned NFF projects, the materials developed are to be used to build understanding and support for process-based restoration in the Valley and beyond. At the same time, Alex collaboratively developed a tool for the NFF that will quantify the volumetric water benefits of their ecosystem restoration efforts. While the former is human-centered and rooted in Alex’s home community and the latter is technical and nationally-focused, both projects have helped catalyze ecosystem restoration in the National Forest lands of the western US.
Project Deliverable
STUDENT RESEARCHER
Alex Wells, Research Assistant and Western Resource Fellow | Alex is a Masters of Environmental Management candidate at Yale School of the Environment, specializing in ecosystem management and conservation. Having grown up in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado, his passions and priorities are centered on the Mountain West and how its ecological systems can be adapted to the climate crisis in a way that helps both ecosystems and people. Alex holds a B.A. in Conservation Biology from Middlebury College and spent the four years prior to Yale coordinating wildlife-focused citizen science projects in Vermont and Colorado. In his freetime, Alex enjoys playing guitar and running up, down, and around mountains. See what Alex has been up to. | Blog