This summer I worked with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Montpelier, Vermont. I interned with their Stewardship team, which is responsible for monitoring and maintaining the preserves and conservation easements TNC has throughout northern Vermont. My work with TNC was varied, making going into work different every day!

We had volunteer work days at TNC preserves either doing trail work or invasive species removal, where members of the community would come to help us maintain TNC preserves. TNC also has partnerships with Vermont companies like Green Mountain Coffee and Keurig, who will send their employees out to volunteer for a day with TNC. Trail work included building a bridge, cutting out a new trail, and mostly building lots of puncheon (small bridges over wet sections of trail). We removed garlic mustard and wall lettuce and treated Japanese knotweed with herbicide.

Another main part of my work with TNC was monitoring TNC preserves and conservation easements that TNC holds on lands throughout the state. The land held in easement could be owned by the state, towns, or privately owned. We would conduct site inspections, taking photopoints using an Esri app called Collector, making sure that all was in compliance with the terms of the easement. Then, back at the office, I wrote inspection reports for each of the site visits. Monitoring was never the same each time; some days it barely felt like work, like when we got to take a boat out to go monitor easements in the Champlain Islands!

Other days it was a lot of work, like on one of my last days where we drove two hours out to the Northeast Kingdom to check out a possible timber trespass on TNC land as observed from aerial photos. We had to bushwhack up a steep slope through spruce forest to find the boundary marker, which was not where it was supposed to be according to our map. Eventually we found it after hiking up and down and all over the place, and it turned out our shapefile for the parcel of land was plotted incorrectly, and there was no timber trespass! Even though it was physically demanding, this was one of my favorite days on the job.

I had an incredible experience working with The Nature Conservancy this summer. I learned a lot about how a private land conservation organization works, from the field work to the office discussions and negotiations to community engagement. I became more confident working independently conducting monitoring visits on my own and writing up the inspection reports myself. Through my experience with TNC, I got a better idea of what I would like in a career, which would definitely involve working for an organization or government agency that is working on land acquisition and conservation.

To future interns, my greatest piece of advice would be to ask lots of questions of your supervisors and coworkers; they have a wealth of knowledge and come from all different kinds of backgrounds. I found it especially helpful to hear about how many of the people working at TNC got to where they are now in their career, and learned that it is never a perfectly planned linear path! But every experience they had led to the next, and I know that my experience with TNC will carry over to wherever I go next after I graduate from UVM.