Centers and Programs at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

Teaching, research, and outreach at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies are greatly enhanced by the Centers and Programs, which have been initiated by faculty through the years. The Centers and Programs, each with a different concentration, are a key component of a student’s learning experience. They allow students to gain hands-on clinical and research experience by sponsoring student internships and projects, coordinating faculty research in areas of common interest, and creating symposia, conferences, newsletters, and outreach programs.

Centers and Programs are funded primarily through private foundations, nongovernmental organizations, state and federal agencies, international granting agencies, and private corporations. The nature and number of Centers and Programs evolve over time, reflecting faculty and student interest. Under the current organizational structure, each program falls under the umbrella of a center, which enables further collaboration and resource sharing.

Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science

The loss of biological diversity is one of the greatest threats facing society today. As we move into the twenty-first century, humanity is witnessing an unprecedented period of extinction. From Sri Lanka to the Western Ghats of India and from the uplands of Amazonia to the Pacific Northwestern United States, a staggering loss of species diversity and habitat is threatening both the integrity of natural systems and the health of human systems. In today’s society, priority conservation areas—those fragile and vital ecosystems threatened with the most severe loss of biodiversity—require more than the traditional, biological approach to protect species and their habitat. Multidimensional in scope, these problems require solutions that draw on the expertise of professionals from various disciplines. In recognition of the scale and dimension of this global threat, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies created the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science.

The goal of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science is to foster the most advanced scientific research in the field and bring this knowledge to bear on solving environmental problems that exist on a human scale. The faculty of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and other leading academic, nonprofit, and scientific organizations, work collaboratively across various disciplines to address complex problems that threaten conservation and the loss of biodiversity. By examining the natural, social, economic, and often political nature of these issues, the center offers creative, cutting-edge solutions to biodiversity problems in ways that allow for the protection of the ecological integrity of natural systems while incorporating the social and economic needs of local communities.

Yale’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science is comprised of three research areas that work to maintain global biodiversity and ecosystem health: Ecology and Conservation Biology; Conservation Policy; and Human Dimensions.

Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems

Coastal and watershed systems are an integral part of the environment and an essential aspect of a holistic approach to environmental studies. The mission of the Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems is to incorporate interdisciplinary study of watersheds and adjacent coastal waters into academic life at Yale.
The small fraction of the earth’s surface occupied by the land-sea margin is enormously important to the environment and to society. A majority of the world’s population inhabits watersheds located within fifty miles of the coast, making these complex, fragile ecosystems especially vulnerable to human impact. The near-shore region includes some of the most unusual and diverse ecosystems, from salt marshes and coral reefs to mangrove forests and river deltas. The coastal zone supports the world’s richest fisheries and sustains significant recreational industries. The growing recognition of the importance and value of coastal and water resources has found expression in an increasing emphasis on public and private research programs.

The Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems promotes interdisciplinary studies and the education of professionals in the management of the special resources of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the coastal region. Because ecological and social structure and function are inextricably linked, neither can be adequately comprehended nor effectively managed in isolation. The center emphasizes studies that help us elucidate the complex, poorly understood, but crucial ways in which human and biophysical systems shape each other. Several courses are available to students with an interest in coastal and watershed issues. In addition to courses in the regular listing, the center sponsors courses and lectures in marine conservation.

School faculty and students conduct physical, biological, and social research in local watersheds and educational outreach programs for the community. Three coastal watersheds in south central Connecticut—the Quinnipiac, Mill, and West rivers—are currently the focus of long-term faculty and student research. The work of the center on these watersheds includes community planning for habitat restoration of degraded urban rivers, studies of nonpoint source pollution, and research on the relation between watershed environmental health and human community performance and effectiveness.

The center’s office houses a growing library of reference materials, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, and computers dedicated to student projects. The summer training modules incorporate an optional day-long training session in coastal watershed field studies. In partnership with the Connecticut Sea Grant College Program, the center provides internships for students working on coastal restoration, preservation, and community outreach projects.

Recent student projects in the center include a survey of vegetation loss in the Quinnipiac River tidal marsh; an assessment of minimum stream flow for fish habitat; a quantification of stream restoration on a watershed scale; an assessment of conservation priorities in a Connecticut watershed using remote sensing and GIS; and a design investigation for a fishway installation.

Urban Watershed Program

The Urban Watershed Program promotes faculty and student research on the unique relationships, impacts, and demands of watersheds in urban areas. Jointly administered by the Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems and the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology, the program combines the interests and resources of the two centers.

Watersheds in urban areas encounter stresses unique to the urban environment, while sharing common characteristics and following natural laws of all water systems. Urban watersheds are often polluted, heavily engineered, inaccessible, and little understood by nearby residents; population density exacerbates stresses on waterways.

As cities emerge from a period when they ignored their rivers and harbors, new relationships are being developed with adjacent waterways. Past practices that marginalized waterscapes from the urban environment are being reevaluated. Now, with more attention to urban environmental quality, there is a greater understanding of the vital role waterways play as sources of open space, transportation, recreation, and habitat.

The Urban Watershed Program promotes the interdisciplinary science and policy studies of these waterways. A convenient study site is offered in the greater New Haven area through the established relationships of the Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems and the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology.

Coastal Field Station

A research facility is available to the Center for Coastal and Watershed Studies at the Peabody Museum Field Station on the Long Island Sound in Guilford. The station provides central access to one of the country’s most important estuaries.

Center for Environmental Law and Policy

A joint undertaking with Yale Law School, this center seeks to engage students in dealing with real-world legal and policy issues. It coordinates an environmental protection “clinic” that undertakes term-long projects for clients (environmental groups, government agencies, community organizations, and private-sector enterprises) staffed by interdisciplinary teams of law and environmental studies students.

The center also supports a wide-ranging program of research and policy development aimed at local, regional, national, and global issues. Projects have included an effort to develop a “next generation” of environmental policy tools and strategies including “Information Age” opportunities and challenges; a series of studies examining the role of foreign investment in supporting sustainable development; work on the linkage between trade liberalization and environmental protection; a study focused on environmental issues in the context of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas; analyses of the role of nongovernmental organizations in environmental policy making; research on the design of environmental regulatory structures; rethinking of global environmental governance institutions; and an exploration of environmental performance measurement and an Environmental Sustainability Index ranking countries. These efforts involve faculty and student collaboration aimed at shaping both academic thinking and public policy making.

Center for Industrial Ecology

The Center for Industrial Ecology (CIE) is dedicated to the promotion of research, teaching, and outreach in industrial ecology. The field is focused on the concept that an industrial system should be viewed not in isolation from its surrounding systems, but in concert with them. It is a systems approach which seeks to optimize the total materials cycle from virgin material, to finished material, to component, to product, to obsolete product, and to ultimate disposal. Factors to be optimized include resources, energy, and capital.

Among the programs and goals of the center are the following:

• Conducting path-breaking research in industrial ecology
• Hosting of visiting national and international scholars in industrial ecology
• Doctoral and postdoctoral study programs in industrial ecology

Two major research foci are (1) the Stocks and Flows Project, in which investigators are evaluating current and historical flows of specific materials, estimating the stocks available in different types of reservoirs, and evaluating the environmental implications, and (2) the Industrial Symbiosis Project, in which multi-year research is being conducted primarily in Puerto Rico to establish the environmental and economic rationale for intra-industry exchange of materials, water, and energy. The center also is engaged in a collaborative project to develop and disseminate research and training in industrial ecology in Asia, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Journal of Industrial Ecology

CIE is home to a highly regarded, international, peer-reviewed journal. Published by MIT Press, the Journal of Industrial Ecology is a multi-disciplinary quarterly designed to foster understanding and practice in industrial ecology and aimed at both researchers and practitioners in academe, industry, government, and advocacy organizations.

Industrial Environmental Management Program

The Industrial Environmental Management (IEM) program at Yale aims to equip students with an integrated set of skills with which to tackle the complex, multifaceted environmental problems facing industrial managers. Within the master’s program, IEM students take courses in natural science, social science, and quantitative methods, followed by courses in environmental policy and management. The core intellectual framework for IEM is industrial ecology.

An active Industrial Environmental Management Student Interest Group sponsors field trips to industrial sites, on-campus talks by visiting managers, and symposia on current topics of interest. In addition, each year the IEM Spring Lecture Series hosts speakers from industry who give presentations and meet with students.

Program on Solid Waste Policy

The program has two principal goals: (1) to inform contemporary policy discussions about solid waste and materials management by applying the methods and findings of social and environmental science; (2) to develop workable policy solutions that address the impediments to safe, cost-effective solid waste management and the complexities of comprehensive materials management.

Environment and Health Initiative

The Environment and Health Initiative is a new research effort being developed to explore important environmental threats to human health. The initiative has a special focus on the risks faced by infants, children, women, and other susceptible populations, and on the common overlap of poverty and environmental health threats. The research is problem-focused and interdisciplinary, and is intended to result in concrete suggestions for improving health and environmental quality through development, education, law, and private investment. Most projects have lives between two and four years, and now include: (1) Food Security, Trade, and Agriculture: GMOs, Beef, Pesticides; (2) Vector-Borne Disease: Malaria and West Nile Encephalitis; (3) Water Availability and Quantity: Israeli Treatment, Urban Supply; (4) Air Quality: Diesel, TRI, and Land Use; (5) Urban Environmental Quality and Health: Asthma in Connecticut Schools; (6) Institutional Capacity for Risk Management: Tanzania and Cameroon; (7) Risk Assessment Methods: Computer Modeling of Exposure and Risk; and (8) Education and Outreach: Curricular Development, Video Production.

Hixon Center for Urban Ecology

The Hixon Center for Urban Ecology provides an interdisciplinary forum for scholars and practitioners to work collaboratively on integrated research, teaching, and outreach to improve our understanding and management of urban environmental resources within the United States and around the globe.

The ecological health and integrity of urban ecosystems have a profound impact on urban economic productivity and quality of life. Pioneering research, new theoretical understanding, and innovative practice will be required to provide the knowledge and tools necessary to foster healthy natural systems essential for the future well-being of the modern city. This need has never been greater than today, when a majority of the world’s population either resides in or is rapidly migrating to urban areas.

To accomplish its mission, the center builds upon and strengthens the work of several programs at the School, including the Yale–UNDP Public-Private Partnerships for the Urban Environment, the Urban Resources Initiative, the Program for Sustainable Environmental Design, and the Urban Watershed Program.

The Hixon Center has a strong focus on collaboration within the School, across the University, and beyond. The center sponsors both lecture series and conferences as a means to disseminate ideas and information concerning the critical issues confronting urban ecosystems and related research required for the foreseeable future.

The Hixon Center also supports Yale faculty scholarly research or initiatives focusing on aspects of environmental science, conservation, policy, or management in an urban context. In addition, the center supports student internships based upon their research proposal’s connection to current Hixon Center research, the outreach potential of that research, and its relevance to the continued study of urban ecology. The center will continue to build the urban environmental focus at Yale while strengthening the School’s urban dimension, creating new models and approaches for addressing urban environmental changes.

Yale–UNDP Collaborative Program on the Urban Environment

The Yale–UNDP Collaborative Program was created in 1996 as one part of a larger UNDP Program on Public-Private Partnerships for the Urban Environment (PPPUE). The purpose is to collect, analyze, and disseminate lessons learned using public-private partnerships (PPP) to improve the delivery of urban water, waste, and energy services in developing countries. The program helps address some of the most pressing public health and environmental issues facing the developing world, particularly the lack of access to clean drinking water or adequate sanitation services.

The partnership between Yale and UNDP grew out of UNDP’s need to involve more private businesses in solving urban environmental issues and the School’s research on how private investment can be used to improve environmental performance. The partnership builds on UNDP’s network of over 130 offices in developing countries, as well as Yale’s research and teaching.

The Yale–UNDP Collaborative Program is one part of a Global Learning Network (GLN) involving individuals and institutions around the world. The goal of the GLN is to serve as a worldwide focal point for partnership analysis, knowledge transfer, as well as local, regional, and global exchanges of experience. Its activities include:

• A Web page (http://www.undp.org/pppue/) designed and written by PPPUE and Yale, containing information on the PPPUE program; searchable databases; articles, research, and policy papers; materials for distance learning; links to related sites; information on PPP courses and events; and other facilities for information exchange among practitioners and experts.
• Interactive databases on public-private partnerships designed by PPPUE and Yale, and assembled by graduate researchers at Yale. As of September 1999, the databases included over 400 PPP reference cases, over 350 PPP contacts, and over 800 bibliographic entries. The databases are interactive: users can not only search them, but can also upload data on their own cases, contacts, and documents.
• Publications, training materials, policy and research papers prepared by PPPUE personnel, faculty and graduate researchers at Yale, and other collaborators. Topics covered include the spectrum of public-private structures being used; the links between public-procurement requirements and PPP; the Clean Development Mechanism as a method for increasing private investment in developing countries; lessons learned about joint venture PPP; methods for linking formal and informal providers of urban water and waste services; and many more. The vast majority of these materials are available on the Web site, and more are being added.
• A distance learning course designed and led by Yale personnel. Entitled “Using Public-Private Collaboration to Improve the Delivery of Urban Environmental Services in Developing Countries,” the course pulls together the lessons learned to date in a thirteen-session seminar. In 1999, the course involved students in South Africa, China, the UK, and the U.S. In 2001, over fifteen universities from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe were involved. Faculty at each of the involved institutions work with local students to explore the course content and see how it fits their local environmental priorities. Lecture notes, charts, and class summaries are posted on the PPPUE Web page and Internet-based interactions are encouraged among students and faculty. The Chinese collaborators are now adapting the course materials for use with non-academic audiences—precisely the desired result.
• Application of the lessons learned through work with UNDP country offices by PPPUE and Yale personnel. The information collected on PPP has been used by UNDP country office personnel in locations ranging from the Philippines, to China, to Lebanon. For the next several years, particular attention will be paid to building the capacity for partnerships in countries such as Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda, Zambia, the Philippines, and Nepal.

As the School continues to confront the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world, the Yale–UNDP Collaborative Program is poised to be an increasingly important part of the learning experience at F&ES.

Urban Resources Initiative

The Urban Resources Initiative (URI) is a not-for-profit/university partnership dedicated to community participation in urban ecosystem management. A substantial body of learning suggests that sustainable urban ecosystem management depends on the meaningful participation of local residents. Those who know local conditions and whose daily actions influence the health and quality of urban ecosystems must play a central role in designing and implementing rehabilitation strategies. Sustainable natural resource management and conservation cannot be achieved by technical, scientific solutions alone. Conservation efforts, especially in urban areas where people represent a significant element of the ecosystem, must emphasize social revitalization alongside environmental restoration.

Yale’s URI program draws on these essential elements to facilitate community participation in urban ecosystem management. “Community” is defined quite broadly: it includes the group of neighborhood leaders with whom interns work to restore abandoned lands near their homes. Community is a group of fifth graders at an inner-city elementary school who are learning how to assess the environmental attributes of their neighborhood. Community is the staff and leadership of city agencies who have the responsibility and resources to become the environmental stewards of their city. URI’s approach responds to and engages all of these communities.

URI offers a number of clinical learning opportunities that allow F&ES students to gain real-world practice in their field. Listening to local concerns and developing environmental programs in cooperation with schools, neighborhood groups, and city agencies are the cornerstones of our work. Through these programs F&ES students can apply theory learned in the classroom with supervised clinical training to enrich their academic work while making a real contribution to the New Haven community. These programs include the Community Greenspace program, environmental education initiatives, research opportunities, and training in urban forestry practices.

Community Greenspace
Each summer, F&ES students work as community foresters as part of the Community Greenspace program, a city-wide initiative to revitalize New Haven’s neighborhoods by restoring vacant lots, planting street trees and front yards, and building community. Each intern works with community groups to develop restoration goals and design an implementation strategy for the summer. The interns help neighbors conduct an inventory of existing trees, select and prepare sites for new plantings, and plant perennials, shrubs, and trees.

The Greenspace program focuses especially on vacant lots, which pose a current and future threat to the quality of life in New Haven. As in many northeastern and midwestern industrialized cities in the United States, these patches of urban land—each typically less than one acre, but together making up hundreds of acres across urban neighborhoods—create great gaps in the landscape: sinkholes where environmental, economic, and community potential is wasted. URI looks to the local experts—the people who live in inner-city neighborhoods—as partners in defining and then assessing, designing, implementing, and sustaining urban restoration sites.

Environmental Education
Since 1991, URI interns have taught hands-on environmental education programs to more than 2,500 New Haven students in twenty public schools. Our current environmental education initiative, Open Spaces as Learning Places, teaches New Haven elementary school students about environmental stewardship through exploration of open space sites in their communities.

Research
The URI programmatic activities in environmental education and urban community forestry create rich research opportunities. For example, using data from the Community Greenspace sites, F&ES student Alexis Dinno initiated a community survey to determine the human health impacts of vacant land. Adrian Camacho investigated differences in biological communities found in different urban locations, using Greenspace sites for comparison against abandoned lots. Another Yale F&ES student, Lianne Fisman, researched how childrens’ play behavior is affected by the design of schoolyards.

Urban Forestry Practices
Over the past decade, URI has created several community and urban forestry training programs, including natural resource managers’ training sessions (for municipal employees), a tree steward training program (for community leaders), and a street tree inventory training project (targeting local residents). These programs have created powerful learning experiences for Yale F&ES students as well as for the target audience. Students gain expertise in developing and implementing training programs across a broad spectrum of topics and audiences and work with and learn from experienced mentors from F&ES and local, state, and federal forestry agencies.

Tropical Resources Institute

The mission of the Tropical Resources Institute is to provide a forum to support and connect the initiatives of the Yale community in developing applied research, partnerships, and programs in the tropics. We support projects that aim to develop practical solutions to issues relating to conservation and management of tropical resources.

TRI was created in 1983 to strengthen the School’s involvement in the management of tropical resources. The institute recognizes that the problems surrounding the management of tropical resources are rapidly increasing in complexity, while demands on those resources are expanding exponentially. Emerging structures of global environmental governance and local conflicts over land use and environmental conservation require new strategies and leaders able to function across diversity of disciplines and sectors, and at local and global scales. TRI aims to build linkages across natural and social sciences and among government agencies, academia, and practitioners, enabling the formation of successful partnerships and collaborations among researchers, activists, and governments. TRI seeks to train students to be leaders in this new era, leveraging resources, knowledge, and expertise among governments, scientists, NGOs, and communities to provide the information and tools this new generation will require to equitably address the challenges ahead.

TRI serves as the nexus within the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies through which faculty and students conduct interdisciplinary research and outreach activities throughout the tropics. Through the institute’s long-term presence in particular locations, TRI serves as a focal point for collaboration with local and international organizations to address particularly important and complex environmental challenges, and extends the School’s educational and training activities to local partners.

Research

TRI administers an endowed fellowship program that supports more than twenty graduate students conducting research in the tropics each year; administers structured long-term research sites to address issues of environmental restoration, protected areas and watershed management, environmental policy and governance, forest fragmentation, community rights to natural resources, and biodiversity conservation in Panama, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia; and supports faculty research in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Education

TRI provides mentoring and training to graduate students in research design, proposal writing, and field methods; sponsors faculty-led courses, workshops, round table discussions, and guest speakers; and trains practitioners through its presence overseas.

Outreach

TRI maintains memoranda of understanding and collaborative research partnerships with more than three dozen leading tropical research and education institutions worldwide, sponsors open public lecture series, assists educational institutions in tropical nations with natural resources curriculum development, cosponsors an annual conference with the International Society of Tropical Foresters, helps publish conference proceedings and assessments of tropical resource issues in the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies Bulletin Series and the Journal of Sustainable Forestry, and hosts an institute Web site (http://www.yale.edu/tri/).

Publications

TRI publishes Tropical Resources: The Bulletin of the Tropical Resources Institute, an annual journal of student research, and a Working Paper series.

The Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry

For over 100 years, the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has had a rich history in the pursuit of sustainable forestry. From the establishment of the School in 1901, in response to the need to train highly effective and innovative leaders in forestry, to the School’s expansion in the 1970s, Yale has played an integral role in the production of leaders who are prepared to confront the environmental challenges of the day.

The new Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry (GISF) at the School continues this rich tradition. Established by the dean and a group of F&ES faculty members in 2000, GISF has launched innovative initiatives while coalescing and coordinating the many activities related to sustainable forest management at the School. The mission of GISF is to foster leadership through innovative programs and activities in research, education, and outreach, to create and test new tools and methods, and to better understand and support sustainable forest management worldwide.

The Institute was created to address the management and conservation of both domestic and international forestlands in a holistic and comprehensive fashion. In pursuit of these ideals, GISF has developed several formal programs, core activities, and initiatives. The programs include the Program on Forest Certification (PFC), The Forests Dialogue (TFD), the Program on Forest Physiology and Biotechnology (PFPB), the Program on Landscape Management Systems (LMS), the Program on Private Forests (PPF), the School Forests, the Program on Tropical Forestry (PTF), and the Yale Forest Forum (YFF). The programs are described in greater detail below.

Current core activities of GISF include the Visiting Fellows Program, a term in residence for senior-level scientists or executives from the forest products industry and conservation community that allows fellows the opportunity to teach seminars, develop partnerships and collaboratives, and interact with the Yale F&ES community; the Summer Internship Program, through which GISF provides summer internship opportunities for students interested in sustainable forestry; the Lantern Slide Preservation Project, a database project in which F&ES students catalogued and scanned turn-of-the-century forestry images onto a CD; the Sustainable Forestry Library, housed in Marsh Hall, which contains working papers, books, and other documents related to forestry and forest management; and the Working Paper Series, which is a new series of working papers, produced by GISF, dedicated to current forest issues.

To carry out these activities, GISF draws on faculty and staff expertise of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, partners with other Yale centers, and cooperates with many institutions in the United States and abroad. In the past, students have participated in these programs as research assistants and interns, and as field crewmembers at the School Forests, and have contributed to published documents that have emerged from program activities. While students provide valuable assistance to the operation of the program, they in turn receive the benefits of working and interacting with global leaders in the field of sustainable management.

The institute is governed by the dean of the School and a group of faculty advisers. The main office and bulk of the work of the institute are housed in Marsh Hall.

Program on Forest Certification

The mission of the Yale Program on Forest Certification is to document, research, teach, and conduct outreach to foster innovations in sustainable forestry management and policy. It is a core program within the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry in the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Forest certification is a unique market-based policy approach that has emerged recently to address global and domestic environmental deterioration. Business associations, landowners, and environmental organizations are attracted to forest certification because it harnesses the power of the marketplace to encourage compliance with environmental and socially responsible standards. Companies and forest owners are audited for compliance and, if successful, are certified as practicing responsible forestry. The promise of forest certification is that it offers an alternative to traditional “stick” approaches that often characterize governmental regulations and boycott campaigns, with “economic based carrot” incentives instead.

The program focuses on three interrelated efforts:

1. Research designed to understand the impacts of forest certification in the promotion of sustainable forestry. Our research is organized around four key themes: governance and certification; the consequences of forest certification in developing countries; environmental effects of certification; and market supply dynamics
   
   
2. Teaching and training on forest certification. Our teaching includes a comprehensive seimnar on forest certification, as well as training on how to conduct certification audits
   
   
3. Outreach activities to the broader forestry community. The program hosts a number of visitors to speak at Yale on forest certification, as well as attending the key certification and sustainable forest policy conferences globally.

The program is housed on the third floor of Marsh Hall. Students have the opportunity to work as researchers and/or assist in the coordination of program activities and certification assessment training.

For details see www.yale.edu/forestcertification.

The Forests Dialogue

The Forests Dialogue (TFD) is a group of individuals from the private sector and civil society from diverse backgrounds and regions who are committed to the conservation and sustainable use of forests. Through a shared understanding of forest issues from their own discussions, members of The Forests Dialogue work together in a spirit of teamwork, trust, and commitment. They believe that their actions and relationships can help catalyze a broader consensus on forest issues and encourage constructive, collaborative action by individual leaders that will improve the condition and value of forests.

Members of TFD participate as individuals, rather than organizational delegates, and they aim to speak for a diversity of perspectives. TFD processes and activities are transparent, complement the actions of others, and seek to advance progress by creating leadership cadres on key issues based on individuals with broader personal consensus. Currently, TFD is focusing on issues related to illegal logging, forest certification, intensive forest management, forests and poverty alleviation, conservation forestry, and identifying a vision for conservation and management of the world’s forests.

GISF hosts the secretariat of TFD. Students have the opportunity to work with the secretariat to conduct background research on issues of interest to TFD and to assist the secretariat in dialogue planning and implementation.

Program on Forest Physiology and Biotechnology

The Program on Forest Physiology and Biotechnology (PFPB) focuses on the relationships of physiology, morphology, and genetics of forest plants to silviculture and sustainable forestry. The main objectives are to analyze ecosystem impacts of biotechnology from biological, technical, and cultural perspectives; to evaluate strategies to minimize possible deleterious effects in these several dimensions; and to organize forums for discussion of the role of genetic techniques in forest health and forest tree improvement in ways that do not represent biological hazard to the future forests of the world.

Current research is focused around two projects, the first of which is the anatomical, physiological, and optical properties of leaves in relation to (a) light intensity and quality, (b) distribution in tree crowns, (c) nutrient status, and (d) ecology and silviculture. A goal of this work is to scale up from the leaf to the tree to the canopy and forest by interfacing reflectance and fluorescence with hyperspectral data from high-resolution remote sensing. It is thought that these methods can provide reliable measurements of forest health. Ultimately, these signals may also identify distribution of species within forest canopies along with measurements of foliar function such as photosynthesis, and cellular phenotypic plasticity (palisade versus spongy mesophyll). Such evaluations can be useful in evaluating sustainability under a variety of site conditions. In conjunction with these approaches, we are cooperating on studies of the anatomy and physiology of trees in many different areas of the world to determine optimal habitats for native species for sustainable forestry.

The second ongoing project concerns the development and use of organic biostimulants to maintain optimum plant growth while reducing fertilizer requirements and increasing natural stress resistance with respect to water, disease, insects, and toxic substances. Graeme P. Berlyn was one of the originators of the biostimulant concept for amplifying plant growth and stress resistance. Current work involves adding beneficial microbes (or their byproducts) to the biostimulant such as mycorrhizas and organisms that inhibit pathogenesis and increase the natural resistance of the plant using chemical signaling to stimulate the production of protective compounds and protective tissues. Efforts are under way to improve the antioxidant systems (superoxide dismutase, ascorbic acid, and glutathione) in tree leaves in order to alleviate stress and increase photosynthesis.

The program is located in the Greeley Laboratory. There are numerous opportunities for students to be involved with the research taking place through the program.

Program on Landscape Management Systems

Forest ecosystems can be defined at a variety of scales—a stand, a landscape, a region, a continent. At all scales, they are dynamic—constantly changing from one condition to another. To manage forest ecosystems requires an understanding and appreciation of the biological, social, and economic dynamics of forest ecosystems. Past attempts to manage at the individual stand scale proved difficult, since stands exist naturally in a variety of structures and each structure provides different values. To provide all values, all structures need to be maintained by different stands across the landscape. This is the basis of the landscape approach to forest management.

The Landscape Management Program (LMP) at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies is a cooperative project with the University of Washington College of Forest Resources Silviculture Laboratory and the USDA Forest Service. Its purpose is to develop the scientific basis, concepts, and tools needed to help forests provide the wide range of values people want—including commodities, wildlife habitat, fire safety, employment, and carbon sequestration. These values are best provided by coordinating the dynamic changes of forests across a landscape, rather than by trying to provide each or all values continuously on a single area.

The LMS program is housed in Greeley Laboratory. Students have a range of opportunities to work with the program, from technical development of the modeling software to field data collection and synthesis.

Program on Private Forests

The Program on Private Forests is engaged in education and research on the health and sustainable management of private forestlands. Our mission is to advance the state of knowledge about sustainable forestry on private forestlands at multiple scales and within multiple contexts. Program initiatives currently focus on forest fragmentation, forest health, management of eastern hardwoods, and changes in forestland ownership.

In order to advance the understanding and management of hardwood forests in the eastern United States, we are working on collaborative efforts in two areas: southern bottomland hardwoods and eastern upland hardwoods. The goals are to enhance communication and collaboration among hardwood silviculturists to build the scientific knowledge base required to meet the future needs of private landowners focused on forest management in an ever more complex and challenging environment.

Faced with urban and suburban sprawl, forests in many parts of the United States are becoming increasingly fragmented, with implications for wildlife, invasive species, forest management, and local forest-based economies. We are developing analytic tools and techniques to assist community leaders, conservation organizations, and citizens to understand and predict land use change dynamics, in particular changes in forested lands. The project is being piloted in the northeastern United States.

Other projects currently under way include: creation of an annotated bibliography and clearinghouse for forest fragmentation literature; organizing forums and workshops to foster informed dialogue about critical forest health risks, such as invasive species and wildfire, and developing strategies for dealing with those risks; and exploring changing ownership patterns on industrial timberlands and the implications of these changes for the conservation of environmental values of forests worldwide. The program also has ongoing projects in New Haven working with a local NGO partner and a charter high school both to manage their twenty-acre urban forest and to develop opportunities for forest ecology and environmental education.

The Program on Private Forests is housed in Marsh Hall. Students have the opportunity to participate in all aspects of the program activities, including research, forums, workshops, and outreach.

School Forests

The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies owns and manages 10,880 acres of forestland in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which are maintained as working forests. The School Forests provide educational, research, and professional opportunities for the students and faculty of the School; they are used as a laboratory for teaching, management, and research.

Students working as interns and managers carry out all management of the forests.

Yale Forest Forum

The Yale Forest Forum (YFF) is a program that serves as the dialogue and convening function of the institute. YFF was established in 1994 by a diverse group of leaders in forestry to focus national attention on broader public involvement in forest policy creation and the management of forests in the United States. In an attempt to articulate and communicate a common vision of forest management to diverse stakeholders, the first initiative of YFF was to convene the Seventh American Forest Congress (SAFC). After a series of local roundtables, the SAFC culminated in a 1,500-person citizens congress in Washington, D.C. The principles discussed during the congress remain part of YFF’s core philosophy of how forest policy discussions should be created: “collaboratively, based on the widest possible involvement of stakeholders.”
YFF’s activities are centered on bringing individuals together for open public dialogues to share experiences, explore emerging issues, and constructively debate varying opinions. In that light YFF sponsors many issues forums and leadership seminars throughout the academic year. YFF forums and seminars not only focus on emerging issues in forest management but also give students exposure to leaders in the NGO, industry, landowner, and government sectors in sustainable forestry. YFF publishes the YFF Review to disseminate to a wide audience the outcomes and lessons learned from its work.

Integral to the work of YFF and the development of many forums is student input and assistance.

Corporate Environmental Leadership Seminar

In June of each year, the School runs the Corporate Environmental Leadership Seminar (CELS), an intensive course in environmental management and policy for executives from industry, government, and NGOs. Begun in 1992, the seminar has attracted international participation by major companies and has established itself as the principal executive program in the United States to focus on environmental issues. The faculty for the seminar is interdisciplinary, drawn from many schools and departments within Yale, as well as invited industry experts.

Partnerships

The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies is a multidisciplinary learning center with tremendous resources, both within and outside the School. The School is engaged in partnerships that range from alliances with other Yale programs and schools to formal agreements with external organizations and universities. These relationships enrich the School and add dimension to the F&ES learning experience.

Within Yale

Students of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies often take advantage of the faculty and resources of other schools and departments within the Yale system. F&ES has several types of arrangements that enable students to fully benefit from the University.

The School has joint-degree agreements with Yale Divinity School, Law School, School of Management, the School of Medicine’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, and the Graduate School’s programs in International Relations, International Economics, and Development Economics. For further information on joint degrees, please refer to Joint Master's Degree Programs and Joint Doctoral Degree.

The School has also cultivated relationships with key faculty members of other divisions of the University who have research and teaching interests that overlap with the School’s foci. These faculty hail from the schools of Architecture, Management, Medicine, and the Faculty of Engineering, as well as the departments of Geology and Geophysics, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology, among others. For a full list of the faculty with joint appointments, see Introduction.

Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies
Established in May 1990, the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies (YIBS) serves as a key focus for Yale University’s research and training efforts in the environmental sciences. YIBS is committed to the teaching of environmental studies to future generations and provides physical and intellectual centers for research and education that address fundamental questions that will inform the ability to generate solutions to the biosphere’s most critical environmental problems. There are currently seven YIBS Research Centers: YIBS Center for Earth Observation; YIBS Center for the Study of Global Change, YIBS Center for the Ecology and Systematics of Animals on the Verge of Extinction (ECOSAVE); YIBS Field Ecology Center; YIBS Center for Stable Isotopic Studies of the Environment; and YIBS Microbial Diversity Center. The School’s current interests are most closely aligned with the Center for Earth Observation and the Field Ecology Center. For full information on the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and its associated centers, please refer to the YIBS Web site: http://www.yale.edu/yibs/.

Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, founded in 1866, contains one of the great scientific collections in North America. Numbering more than eleven million objects and specimens, the collections are used for exhibition and for research by scholars throughout the world. A growing Internet service makes catalogue data for more than one million of these specimens and objects available online at http://www.peabody.yale.edu/. Workshops and laboratories in the fields of paleontology, archaeology, zoology, and evolutionary biology make the Peabody a working museum, where public exhibition, research, and teaching intersect.

The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies maintains a close association with the Peabody. The museum’s director and curators provide support for a concentration in museology under the F&ES Master of Environmental Studies program. The Peabody Field Station in Guilford, Connecticut, is used collaboratively for research on coastal and estuarine systems.

External Partnerships

The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has partnership agreements with numerous local, national, and international organizations beyond the Yale campus. The following are a few examples of these arrangements.

Hubbard Brook
The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study in New Hampshire is a long-term multidisciplinary investigation of the structure, function, and interactions among atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems. Proposed in 1960 by F.H. Bormann and started in 1963, Hubbard Brook is one of the oldest Long-Term Ecological Research sites supported by the National Science Foundation. As such, the facility has functioned as a national center and attracted investigators from a spectrum of biological and physical sciences.

F&ES Professor Emeritus F. Herbert Bormann and Gene E. Likens founded the Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study. Today the School’s students and faculty benefit from more than thirty-five years of data and hands-on clinical experience. The Hubbard Brook ecosystem provides collaborators with background data drawn from long-term records of climate, hydrology, precipitation, and streamwater chemistry; and with biological data from numerous ongoing studies. Cooperative research at Hubbard Brook has contributed to a better understanding of the northern hardwood ecosystem. The Hubbard Brook investigators are achieving the most fundamental aspect of ecosystem studies—the integration of data into a functioning scheme of ecosystem behavior through time.

National University of Singapore
The National University of Singapore is a top research university with a far-reaching faculty and a multinational student body. The University offers a Master of Science in Environmental Management that provides environmental management education for senior and midlevel managers in corporations, institutions, and government and nongovernmental organizations. This new program is multidisciplinary, with the combined resources of seven of the University’s faculties, and international, drawing on the expertise of established environmental agencies and institutions both locally and globally.

In 2001 the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies entered into an official agreement with the National University to share scientific, academic, and technical resources; exchange faculty and students; and cooperate in research, outreach, and conferences.

The New York Botanical Garden
The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has enjoyed a reciprocal relationship with the Graduate Studies Program at the New York Botanical Garden for many years. Begun in 1896, the Botanical Garden program currently enrolls thirty-nine students who are carrying out studies in systematic and economic botany at field sites around the world. The program’s expertise spans the spectrum of both systematic and economic botany. It is operated in conjunction with several other academic institutions, including the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

The resources of the New York Botanical Garden include one of the largest botanical libraries in the world, with more than 1.25 million accessions, an herbarium with over six million specimens and 10,000 species of living plants housed in several greenhouses, as well as an electron microscope, environmental chambers, and instrumentation for radiobiological, biochemical, anatomical, molecular, phytochemical, chemosystematic, numerical taxonomy, and vegetational studies.

The Energy and Resources Institute
The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a not-for-profit organization in NewDelhi, India, was founded in 1974. Over the years, TERI has expanded from its initial purpose of documentation and information dissemination to become a dynamic and flexible organization with a global vision and a local focus. Twenty years ago, the institute initiated research projects in the fields of energy, environment, and sustainable development. Today, TERI is an internationally recognized center for research and outreach, and this reputation is rapidly being enhanced by the educational opportunities offered by the TERI School of Advanced Studies, which was granted “Deemed-to-be-University” status by the government of India in 1998.

The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies entered into an official agreement with TERI in 2001, whereby each organization agreed to support the other’s faculty and student activities, thus expanding the resources of both learning institutions while fostering international relationships.

Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University in Beijing is one of the leading universities in China. The School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at Tsinghua University are partners in the Environment and Sustainable Development Leadership Program (ESDLP). ESDLP provides leadership training for municipal officials from cities throughout China. ESDLP offers mayors and other offi-cials in charge of city planning, construction, and environmental protection an intensive week of seminars on urban sustainable development trends, challenges, and opportunities; sustainable development in urban ecosystems; and the principles and methods of industrial ecology and cleaner production. The initial week of seminars is followed by a two-week study tour in the United States or Europe.

External Joint-Degree Programs
The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies also has joint-degree agreements with the Pace University School of Law and the Vermont Law School. Further information on these programs is available through the admissions office.

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