Welcome to Ke, Aline, and Kati

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Originally uploaded by World Forest Institute

Following the recent arrivals of three new WFI International Fellows to Portland, Oregon, WFI can happily say that for the first time in its history, the Fellowship boasts more women in the program than men. Each woman brings a different background and project, but all are firsts in their own way.
 
Kati Brueckner is a student at the University of Applied Sciences in Eberswalde, Germany. Her six month research project will examine the adoption and implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan. She is focusing on the contexts and underlying interests of policy and science that influenced the debate around the plan, in order to assess their contributions to the discourse as well as the ecopolitical responses. Kati is our first female German Fellow, and she actually won her sponsorship funding by winning $33,000 Euros in Germany's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Now that's a first!
 
Dr. Ke Dong is a Senior Forest Program Officer at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) China Liaison Office, based in Beijing. During her 12 month Fellowship, Ke will examine Payment for Ecological Services (PES) as a way to balance development with conservation objectives, and she will conduct a comparative study between China and the US to evaluate increasing international practices in PES. Dr. Ke is our first Fellow from China who comes through an NGO rather than state government, which shows how much the role of NGOs has grown in China in recent years.
 
Aline Moreira from Brazil is our first American Forest Foundation-sponsored Fellow. She completed her Masters in Sustainable Resource Management in the School of Forest Science and Resource Management at the Technical University in Munich, Germany, and has a background in social work. She will be spending her 12 month Fellowship to update and improve AFF's Project Learning Tree's "Global Connections: Forests of the World" curriculum. This is a guide and activity set for educators to help students gain an increased understanding and appreciation of the world forest environment, with emphasis on the human interaction with, and dependence on, those environments.