Living alongside black and grizzly bears can be a fact of life for many communities across North America. Sometimes this leads to conflict, such as when a bear becomes habituated to eating human food and loses its fear of humans. When and how can communities work together to reduce the likelihood of these conflict situations? I am leading a research team to explore this question in collaboration with community, state and national groups. We are currently in the pilot phase of this research, and plan to expand the project through a PhD project led by a graduate student joining the team in late 2022. (Photo credit: Eric Kilby, CC BY-SA 2.0 license, flickr.com)

Gardening with native plants is one way to help local birds and insects, and can save water and beautify a neighborhood. But how do we get more people to do it, and to talk about it with people they know? For my PhD, and later in my postdoc, I worked with Audubon Rockies’ Habitat Hero program and the City of Fort Collins’ Nature in the City team to investigate. We found all sorts of reasons why people get involved in what’s sometimes called “wildscape gardening”, which I wrote about in this blog. You can also watch a conference talk I gave in 2020 about this, or check out our project website or my publications page for our latest findings as they get published.

Key takeaways: 1. Getting involved in native plant gardening can lead people to encourage others, but this social diffusion has different barriers and motivations than private action. These include people’s confidence in their own abilities (efficacy) and their perceptions of how others will respond (social norms). 2. There’s all kinds of different ways to get involved in native plant gardening and outreach, depending on people’s unique circumstances and interests.

Eating plant-based food is becoming increasingly popular as a strategy to help address climate change, improve human health, and support animal welfare. With so many different reasons to care about changing what we eat, the shift to more sustainable diets is an ideal test case for relational organizing research. In 2021 my colleagues and I received an NSF grant to support a new 2-year study, in collaboration with Mercy for Animals and the City of Boulder. We are using surveys and field experiments to test an integrative model we’ve developed of the social-psychological drivers of relational organizing, including personal norms, social identity, habit, attitudes, efficacy, and second-order beliefs about what others believe. We are focused on helping people take an incremental approach to making their diets more sustainable and to making their conversations with other people about sustainable diets more effective and enjoyable.

Sexual harassment and assault are bad for people, teams and organizations for all kinds of reasons. Preventing sex-based harassment from happening in the first place is therefore a critical priority for people trying to make their organizations better places to work and grow. This is especially true in conservation and other scientific professions where fieldwork can make people more vulnerable. I am collaborating with colleagues who founded the Building a Better Fieldwork Future initiative to study how evidence-based prevention interventions can create a safe, respectful field science culture that contributes to effective science and a viable, healthy profession in which all scientists flourish. The initial phase of this project will be to test what effects the BBFF sexual harassment and assault prevention workshop has on participants’ knowledge and self-efficacy to intervene at different stages of the fieldwork process, and how this informs their subsequent behaviors and feelings of safety and belonging.

In collaboration with ODFW’s Oregon Marine Reserves, we are helping design and conduct a study using approaches from social psychology to a) understand perceptions of ocean acidification among Oregonians and coastal visitors, and b) explore the use of micro-interventions such as nudges to increase their personal and public behaviors related to ocean acidification.

Back in 2017 a small group of us came together around the idea of launching an initiative to support women leaders in African conservation. Since then, this group has grown into a vibrant, diverse community of women in African conservation and environmental organizations who have created a brand new leadership program for their fellow women. The core of this program is a 1-year fellowship for 20 women to offer each other mutual support and create strategies for ramping up protection for nature in Africa while paying it forward with integrity. Prior to 2022 I helped lead the Understanding and Adapting and Global Network branches of WE Africa in close collaboration with colleagues in Africa. We investigated how mentorship, coaching, and peer support can help boost women’s confidence, courage, vulnerability, visibility, innovation and wellbeing.

Conservation International has an internal initiative to support women’s leadership development so they are more supported to advance to senior roles within the organization. I worked with the founders of the Rising Women program and the women participating within it to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses and outcomes from this year-long multi-national cohort of CI women. In particular, we investigated how participants’ sense of their identity as leaders shifts over their time in the Rising Women program, and how cohort experiences support individuals’ personal growth.

For several decades now the Center for Protected Area Management has worked to build capacity among conservationists working in protected areas, with a particular focus on Latin America. For the last several years they have been expanding this focus to included dedicated seminars and workshops for women leaders across Central and South America and beyond. I collaborated with CPAM to integrate my research findings into their teaching, and with my colleague Dr. Jen Solomon to co-advise a student at Colorado State University to evaluate the impacts that CPAM’s programs have on the women who participate in them.