Carpenter Ecology

---

My time working in Laikipia County, Kenya coincided with a one of the increasingly frequent droughts. This period brought conflict between the conservancy, where I was working, and neighboring pastoralist communities. While the balance between conservation and livestock grazing was not the focus of my research, it was impossible to ignore the situation. By witnessing this conflict it became clear that climate change is poised to disrupt the often tenuous balance between land use and conservation. Coming to this conclusion, I knew that my future research would focus on the boundary of community ecology where it is directly applicable to both livestock operations and conservation planning.

Currently my work focuses on the response of dryland plant communities to extreme climate events and shifting weather patterns. Over the course of my PhD, I have grown to appreciate the nuances that exist in the land use and conservation sectors. My research is based in southwestern Wyoming on big sagebrush ecosystems, and while similar tensions exists between cattle ranchers and conservation organizations the ecological context is entirely different. There is no silver bullet, implementing conservation and land use solutions to productivity swings, invasive species and a host of other issues is context dependent. Successful solutions rely on ecosystem dependent research. Not only is the ecology different but the attitudes of both conservationists and livestock operations change with the systems. These shifts reinforce the necessity for environmental scientists to work with political intermediaries that can speak on behalf of putting research into practice. I believe that optimizing livestock operations and advancing conservation goals relies on the ability of researchers to work with local and national politicians.

Interests

---