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Student Spotlight: Anne Short
Student Spotlight Directory
PHOTO/A. PATIL
ERG PhD candidate, Anne Short.
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Emergency repair of road slippage: contractor is armoring bank with rocks to protect nearby stream from sedimentation. |
"Governing Private Land-Use"
Anne Short is a PhD Candidate in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation research explores if and how various forms of governance (e.g. regulation, management incentives, public education and outreach) prompt private landowners to adopt more sustainable land management practices.
In the past three decades, urban and suburban residents have been migrating into rural areas of the United States at a rapid pace. The resulting subdivision of large tracts of forest, agricultural, and wild-lands changes the social, economic, and ecological characteristics of rural areas and creates new challenges for environmental protection. Rather than working with a small number of large landowners, land managers face the new challenge of developing programs that help a large number of diverse landowners to adopt environmentally sustainable land management practices. Anne’s dissertation research addresses this challenge by investigating if and how a variety of regulatory and non-regulatory programs promote the prevention and control of sediment (a common pollutant impacting water quality) from private roads on residential, ranch and timberlands in the North Coastal basin of California.
Located along the northern coast of California, the 5.5 million acres of the North Coastal basin are the site of multiple struggles over land-use, land management, private property rights, environmental regulation, and the preservation of rural economies. One of the most publicly debated and complex of these struggles is the protection of pacific salmon. The survival of salmon is threatened by a combination of habitat degradation, dams and other impoundments, over-harvesting, and negative ecologic and genetic interactions with hatchery-bred fish. Sediment pollution associated with roads has been identified as one of the primary factors contributing to the degradation of salmon habitat in the North Coastal basin and has catalyzed a wide range of regulatory and non-regulatory attention to the reduction and control of road related sediment on private lands. Anne uses a combination of in-depth interviews with landowners, NGOs, and staff at government agencies, site visits, participant observation, a large mail survey of landowners, and archival research to analyze the effectiveness of these sediment control programs. She hopes her research will help land managers in the study basin and across the rural United States to build effective land management programs that account for the unique management opportunities and constraints of different kinds of private landowners.
Ranch road located on ridge to minimize sedimentation; City of Ukiah and the Russian River Valley in background.
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With its focus on problem-based research, ERG has been an ideal home for Anne as she pursues this interdisciplinary research. She was drawn to the program because of its emphasis on interdisciplinary scholarship that seeks to find solutions for complex human-environmental problems. She finds that the ERG students and faculty are constant sources of awe, inspiration and support; and their work serves as a refreshing reminder that good research can be both relevant and academically rigorous.
Anne holds a MS from the Energy and Resource Group and a BS in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College. Prior to joining ERG, she spent a year as a Watson Fellow studying food security and subsistence living in the Republic of Kiribati, Nepal, Mali, Thailand and South Africa. In addition to her work on land-use and management, Anne has also worked on sustainability indicators, urban food security, and urban environmental education.
Anne is grateful for the support and guidance from her dissertation committee, Tim Duane (DCRP), Richard Norgaard (ERG) and Elizabeth Boyer (ESPM), and countless others around campus and the world that have shared their time and friendship. Financial support for her graduate studies and research has come from the Energy and Resources Group, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Switzer Environmental Leadership Fellowship.
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