Housing Support: Housing stipend up to $5,000 for the entire Fellowship is authorized based on actual expenses incurred. Fellow will be required to provide documentation to validate reimbursement.

Housing Description: Fellow will be responsible for locating and securing suitable housing. This will be a remote position—stable and dependable internet connection is required.

Valid Driver’s License: Not Required

Position Description: Sentinel Landscapes represent well-defined geographies where the military, conservation, agriculture, and forestry communities have shared interests. The U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Defense, and Interior created the Sentinel Landscape Partnership initiative to facilitate federal, local, and private collaboration to promote natural resource sustainability in areas surrounding military installations. In these areas, federal agencies work with local partners to provide financial and technical resources to private landowners. The goal is to increase sustainable management practices and connect private landowners with programs to keep working lands working. There are 12 Sentinel Landscapes across the Nation, and 5 are within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Region 4 geography. Staff from Ecological Services and Conservation, Science, and Innovation are already working with these partnerships.

This position seeks to increase opportunities to support imperiled and at-risk species by facilitating collaboration across state and Sentinel Landscape boundaries. For example, the Georgia Sentinel Landscape and the South Carolina Lowcountry Sentinel Landscape share a boundary, which represents an opportunity to assess how these two partnerships can collaborate on common goals. Staff from Ecological Services and Conservation, Science, and Innovation can help support this position to help facilitate conservation actions that support the goals and strategic plans of these landscapes and advance the mission of the USFWS Southeast Region to connect lands and waters to sustain fish, wildlife, and plants.

These two USFWS programs will collaborate to supervise a shared Fellow who will work within Southeastern Sentinel Landscapes to advance shared conservation goals and improve habitats for a wide array of species including those that are imperiled, at-risk, or conservation concern across boundaries.

To implement this project, the selected Fellow will be responsible for:

• Using GIS to identify priority locations for imperiled species and habitats that areas common to all Sentinel landscapes, to include habitat corridors between population locations;
• Reviewing and summarizing specific Sentinel Landscape plans to identify common priorities; and
• Assessing at least two Sentinel Landscape’s conservation and strategic plans to identify their shared goals, at-risk species, and important habitats as well as potential conservation actions and opportunities that advance those common elements.

The Fellow will explore working with existing tools such as the Southeast Conservation Blueprint, the At-Risk Species Finder, and the Landscape Recovery Tool to assess their utility as well as other data sets to help identify at-risk species across the two landscapes (e.g., NatureServe, DOD datasets, state heritage programs).

The Fellow will be able to build qualitative and quantitative data analysis skills, as well as understand the field of user experience in decision-making tool development and utilization. They will be asked to consider how we can take data collected across scales (i.e., landscape-level partnerships as well as unique user experiences) and translate this knowledge into a functioning, collaborative, and inclusive conservation partnership. They will be tasked with considering multiple ecological, social, and economic contexts, each influencing the conservation partnership in nuanced ways. They will learn how these large-scale partnerships function across jurisdictions while still representing shared values.

The Fellow for this Fellowship who has familiarity and experience with the data collection methods and analysis we would also prefer a Fellow who has had some level of experience with partnership-based conservation.

The Fellow will be responsible for providing a written summary and synopsis of the all the GIS work created, ensure the GIS information is shareable and available to be built upon for potential future work. Fellow will be responsible for accurate written and verbal communication with external partners as they will serve as a liaison for our Sentinel landscape within the South East region.

Minimum Education Level: Open to consideration only to graduate students (master's and PhD) who will not complete their degree requirements before September 22, 2024.

Fields of Study:

• Biological Sciences
• Education/Outreach
• Human Dimensions/Social Sciences/Humanities/Liberal Arts
• Geographic and Information Sciences
• Communication/Marketing

Working Conditions Requirements: 

• Ability to work on a computer for a full workday
• Ability to work effectively in a remote environment

Desired Characteristics: 

• Interpersonal and Cross-cultural communication skills
• Partnership building experience
• Project management experience
• Teamwork skills
• Data analysis skills GIS skills