School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2022

Forest School launches two new initiatives

The Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment has launched two new initiatives that will broaden academic offerings for YSE students and expand the Forest School’s outreach efforts. The Northeast Forest Farmers Coalition aims to establish a community of forest farmers across the northeast US, bringing together universities, nonprofits, businesses, and other organizations to conduct research and provide education and outreach to landowners to grow forest farming operations in the region. The Maple Education and Extension Program is a new training initiative at Connecticut’s Yale-Myers Forest that is promoting sustainable maple syrup production techniques, with training workshops focused on sap collection, maple silviculture, syrup processing, and sustainable management of sugarbushes. Both programs, spearheaded by Director of Forest and Agriculture Operations Joseph Orefice ’09MF, were made possible by generous funding from the US Department of Agriculture.

Study finds more than 800 species threatened by urban expansion

With the global urban population expected to increase by 2.5 billion in the next 30 years, urban lands are expected to expand significantly, threatening 855 species, according to a published study led by Karen Seto, Yale School of the Environment Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science, and Walter Jetz, director of the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. The cities that pose the greatest threat to species due to expansion are smaller or growing urban areas predominantly located in the developing tropical regions of sub-Saharan Africa, South America, Mesoamerica, and Southeast Asia. Seto says, however, that focusing global efforts on minimizing impacts on habitats in these growth regions can help conserve and protect species. “We can build cities differently than we have in the past. They can be good for the planet; they can save species; they can be biodiversity hubs and save land for nature.”