Date of Award

2016

Publisher

North Dakota State University

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Awarded

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Program

Natural Resources Management

Department

Natural Resources Management

College

Agriculture, Food Systems and Natural Resources

Faculty Advisor

Norland, Jack

Description

Natural Resources Management is a combination of disciplines all working together to improve management practices, environmental education, and cross-discipline communication. Land managers and conservationist have become a group of people thrust into the public eye and to help the world make sense of the ecological and climatic changes that are taking place. For this reason, Natural Resources Management PhD’s have become a community needed to interface with the public in order to balance environmental and societal needs. This dissertation project took a renaissance approach by examining a wide range of fields. It is said that a Renaissance man is knowledgeable and proficient in a wide range of fields or they are interdisciplinary. The world is in need of a conservation renaissance to reconnect the environment back to societal values, and it is going to need an interdisciplinary approach to do so. To do this each of the three areas: communication, education, and application were explored. Communication was addressed in two parts, first through the completion of a partnered publication with United States Fish and Wildlife Services, which used a framework from education (backward design) to communicate best practices for tallgrass prairie reconstruction in North Dakota. A second document was then completed describing how the backward design model was used to optimize communication. To further connect the importance of education to Natural Resource Management, I partnered with the Minnesota State University Moorhead Regional Science Center and their curriculum based field trips; drawing artifacts were collected and examined using the coding scheme from Human Figure Drawing and cross-racial facial recognition to determine what cues are utilized in novice plant observers. The Natural Resource Management application research was conducted on conservation lands in eastern North and South Dakota comparing the spike seeding method with more traditional seeding methods.

Rights

NDSU policy 190.6.2

Rights Link

https://www.ndsu.edu/fileadmin/policy/190.pdf

Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0003-1042-9305

Handle Identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/10365/28232

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