Smith Fellows Spring Retreat Winter Harbor, ME

Retreat goals: to welcome the Class of 2024 to the Smith Fellows Program and build collaborative working relationships among the Fellows, to learn how to create and use GIS Story Maps to tell a conservation story, and develop budgeting  and financial management skills.

The Maine retreat at Schoodic Institute (Acadia National Park) included all participants from the 2022, 2023 and 2024 cohorts. It was a great opportunity for the outgoing, current, and new cohort to meet, network, and collaborate. We shared a teary certificate ceremony for the outgoing 2022 cohort, and a joyous welcome to the incoming Fellows. 

The group participated in a budgeting workshop led by long time SF reviewer Erika Fleishman focused on how to prepare grant budgets and work with a University SRO office, as well as a two-day workshop on ArcGIS story mapping. Fellows brought their data sets and walked through how to spatially represent their data to present it in a story format for a targeted audience. These presentations also serve as an excellent way to communicate work broadly. 

To close out the week, the group participated in a field safety and harassment training led by 2022 Smith Fellow, Melissa Cronin, co-founder of Field Futures. This served as a great introduction on how to plan and prepare for field work, important considerations around personal and group safety, and how to identify, deal with, and most importantly, prevent harassment.

2020 Fellow, Chris Nadeau, was our host at Schoodic Institute, and organized meetings with the National Park Chief Scientist at Acadia, the Tribal liaison and head scientist, and the restoration team.  Fellows learned about the co-management efforts at Acadia, as well as the challenges and successes with restoration at a location where climate change is happening fast, and is presenting challenges to applied conservation on multiple levels.  It was a rich experience and an opportunity for the Fellows to learn first hand from a team that is very intentional about integrating applied management approaches and research tools to the management of a changing National Park landscape.