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The 10 months that Megan Kram has been with The Nature Conservancy is relatively small, but the scale of her job is not. As the Colorado chapter's Public Lands Coordinator, Megan builds partnerships and facilitates strategic planning to help ensure the health of lands that cover nearly half the state – lands managed by the federal government.
Public lands make up so much of the state that they are critical in determining the future of Colorado’s natural areas. Much of Megan’s work centers on partnerships with the Forest Service and the BLM, who manage over 40 percent of Colorado lands and whose multiple-use mandates result in their collaboration with a suite of stakeholders, from off-road vehicle users to wilderness advocates to energy interests.
“We work very differently with public land partners than with private,” says Megan. “Private lands efforts focus largely on real estate deals. With public lands partners like BLM and the Forest Service, we complete some real estate projects, such as land consolidation, but we also share science and collaborate on agency land use plans. In these plans, agencies decide where to allow uses such as recreation, timber harvest, oil and gas development, and conservation areas across the vast lands that they manage. We share information about special species and places with agencies to inform their decisions.”
By offering best available science on species as well as large scale processes like migration, the Conservancy shares information complementary to agency expertise in an effort to demonstrate “what kind of impacts affect what species, and then evaluate that over time to see what adjustments in management could benefit land health.”
Megan grew up in Michigan, but was drawn to conservation work because “my grandparents lived in a home surrounded by farmland in upstate New York. I feel most at home in vast landscapes.” Her maiden journey west of the Mississippi was spurred by an “Ecology of the Desert Southwest” course and she became besotted with western landscapes. “That became the basis for my desire to move West and work in conservation.”
Now she gets to spend the majority of her time in many of the largest landscapes remaining in Colorado, working with people in the Forest Service and BLM who share her attraction to vast landscapes and big challenges, and her desire to keep those natural areas healthy and intact.
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