By Isabella Acosta-Jimenez, Land Conservation Fellow 

If you’ve ever looked at property lines on a map, it’s easy to forget that nature doesn’t recognize those boundaries. Deer bound over stone walls. Seeds travel on the wind. Brooks flow downhill. Invasive species spread wherever they can. The invisible lines between two points on the ground are there to show humans who “owns” what, but they mean little to the ecological systems that move freely across them.

I encounter this tension daily in my work protecting priority habitats alongside private landowners, municipalities, and conservation organizations. A stone wall may divide two parcels, one that is part of a wildlife sanctuary with an ecological management plan, and the other privately managed, but buckthorn, beech leaf disease, and deer pressure permeate both. (“Parcels” are individual units of land ownership, and neighboring properties that share a boundary are referred to as abutting.)

We use mechanisms such as conservation restrictions (CR), legal agreements that permanently limit development on privately-owned land, to protect properties neighboring Mass Audubon sanctuaries. These conserved parcels often function as buffers to our sanctuaries, despite often being managed separately or not at all.

When I began my work as the Land Conservation Fellow, I saw protection itself as the goal: secure the land, monitor the boundary, conserve what’s inside. Over time, I’ve come to see how incomplete that approach is. Rather than treating protected parcels as isolated units, we must manage habitats continuously across privately owned protected land and abutting Mass Audubon-owned properties.

My professional project aims to bridge that divide by coordinating stewardship plans across property lines, engaging landowners in shared management strategies, and collaborating with university students and experienced volunteers on field-based projects to assess habitat vulnerabilities across boundaries.

It also extends beyond the field. At a Student Research Summit this May, students from UMass Amherst and Westfield State presented their findings, turning site-specific observations into a broader conversation about landscape-scale stewardship. Collaborators, including students, conservation practitioners, educators, and landowners, came together and, through listening and engagement, we explored methods to evaluate climate resilience, identify and quantify vulnerabilities, and develop adaptive management plans that reflect how ecological systems function on the ground, beyond boundary lines drawn on paper.

Managing by habitat rather than boundary recognizes ecological continuity, and it plays out visibly on the ground. For example, an ash tree grows on a slope above a meandering brook that serves as a parcel boundary. On one side, the land is a sanctuary; on the other, it is privately managed—yet the system functions as one. One year, a regional drought strikes, and the soils dry across the entire slope. Deer move freely between properties, traversing the slope and compacting earth, accelerating erosion on both sides. Roots become exposed, and the tree weakens—along with all the ashes around it. The emerald ash borer arrives, thriving in this landscape-scale stress. Within years, the ash trees are gone—not just from a single parcel, but from the connected system.

During a conversation with a conservation restriction landowner distressed by the loss of ash, beech, and hemlock on her property, I realized how widespread these issues are. When I shared Mass Audubon’s approach—that these species are unlikely to return at scale, and stewardship now requires adaptation rather than restoration—she was stunned. Protection, she realized, was no longer a guarantee of ecosystem stability.

She’s not the only landowner grappling with this reality. In a recent Mass Audubon survey, CR deedholders list their top concerns as invasive species management, trail maintenance, and wildlife habitat stewardship. Many are navigating public access and ecological care without the technical capacity or resources to address the threats that move freely across property lines onto their land. They aren’t asking to relinquish their ownership. They’re asking for partnership.

Large conservation organizations, while often stretched thin, hold a broader regional perspective, along with technical expertise, volunteer networks, and access to funding that individual landowners don’t have on their own. My work sits at that intersection: connecting landowners to support, aligning stewardship across boundaries, and treating ecological care as a shared responsibility rather than an individual burden.

This isn’t defeatism. It’s a recalibration. Rather than insisting on restoration to a fixed past, it asks what can function under changing conditions—and where human intervention can meaningfully slow loss without promising permanence. The Rights of Nature framework challenges us to see the land as a living system with inherent value beyond property.

Stewardship, then, isn’t about control but responsibility to support ecological processes that predate and will outlast us. The work ahead isn’t about drawing harder lines; it’s about caring for what moves across them.

Isabella Acosta-Jimenez (she/her) is originally from New Jersey, where her passion for the outdoors grew from exploring trails and open space. She earned a B.S. in Environmental Studies with honors and a minor in Anthropology from Davidson College in 2024.  

At Davidson, Isabella led affinity trips for students of color through Davidson Outdoors and completed an honors capstone using geoarchaeological methods to reconstruct the environmental history of an ancient agricultural site in Cyprus. After graduating, she au pair-ed in Italy, interned at an environmental policy think tank, and served as an instructor at the Cathleen Stone Island Outward Bound School. These experiences have shaped her commitment to scientifically grounded, inclusive, and community-driven conservation.  

Outside of work, Isabella enjoys reading, crafting, and exploring new places near and far.

By Tiare Sierra Rivera, Ecological Restoration Fellow 

Not too long ago, I stepped into a salt marsh for the first time.  It was a warm and sunny September day, and I was a senior at Boston University taking a class, “Estuaries and Nearshore Systems,” with Professor Sergio Fagherrazzi—a big name in the salt marsh world for his work on marsh morphodynamics during accelerated sea level rise. As part of the class, we headed out to Plum Island Sound, the largest estuarine ecosystem in New England, to collect elevation and sediment data. 

It was wonderful: the bright green grasses rolled toward the horizon, the deep blue of the ocean pushed in and out with this quiet-but-powerful rhythm, and then… the smell. A strong, putrid, decomposing peat-meets-salt smell. And yet, paired with the stunning scene and fascinating science at hand, I loved it. By the time I got home, my camera roll had 40 new photos—horseshoe crabs, mud patterns, pickleweed, everything. I had never seen a salt marsh before, since we don’t have them back home in Puerto Rico. Maybe that’s why it felt so magical. But I also couldn’t help thinking: How have I lived in Boston for three years and no one has ever mentioned these places to me? 

On the last day of the class, Professor Fagherrazzi awarded me the “Crab Award,” given to the student who had the most fun (and was the most clumsy) on our field work trips out at Plum Island. Fast forward to today, a little over two years later, and the biggest project of my fellowship with Mass Audubon’s Ecological Restoration team has been, fittingly, the Salt Marsh Framework.  

Mass Audubon’s Senior Coastal Ecologist Sara Grady has been dreaming about this project since 2024. When I joined the Ecological Restoration team in June 2025, she told me about her idea of mapping all salt marshes in the state and gathering multiple datasets to visualize information on the present and future of salt marshes in Massachusetts. She then hoped to use that data to roll out statewide management and restoration recommendations to local governments, organizations, and scientists interested in restoration. 305 hours of work later, from October 2025 to April 2026, the Salt Marsh Framework is now doing just that.  

Today, the Salt Marsh Framework is a GIS-based model that scores marshes across three dimensions: Condition (looking at vegetation health and surrounding land use); Trajectory (accounting for tidal position, elevation gain, marsh-edge exposure); and Migration (assessing potential opportunities for salt marsh landward movement as sea level rises). These scores connect directly to restoration and management actions, helping users understand both the urgency and the restoration potential. The framework includes extra “lenses” like marsh size, blue carbon value, and bird habitat importance so anyone—from academics and students to researchers and consultants to conservationists and other scientists—can tailor decisions to their ecological goals. The version 1 Map Viewer product is now available for anyone curious about the state of Massachusetts salt marshes.  

Working on this project opened a huge door for me: I was recently accepted into the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography to pursue a Master of Science in Marine Geology. Starting in September, I’ll be researching salt marsh resilience and migration across Northeast National Parks, from Assateague Island in Virginia all the way up to Acadia in Maine. Whether it is analyzing data or getting muddy out in the salt marsh, I’m excited for another opportunity to get to know these ecosystems a little better—both for my own pleasure and for a future full of healthy salt marshes. 

Tiare Sierra Rivera (she/her) grew up in Puerto Rico. She graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in Earth and Environmental Science, concentrating in GIS and remote sensing, and minoring in marine science. While at BU, she was a student-athlete on the sailing team, earning MVP honors two years in a row.  

Tiare’s environmental journey includes two summer internships in climate resiliency and environmental permitting, as well as a transformative summer experience conducting scientific diving research in Mozambique. During the academic year, she taught an accredited sailing course to fellow college students and served as a teaching assistant for an introductory environmental science class. 

By Tami Gordon, Nature in the City Fellow

As the Nature in the City (NITC) Fellow with Mass Audubon, I recently attended the Hope Summit in Charleston, South Carolina, a gathering that brought coastal and inland communities together to explore how land, water, and people are interconnected. Mornings were filled with workshops led by city planners, non-profit founders, early-career and seasoned professionals. Our afternoons were spent walking the city, learning through observation and experience. (Who knew that falling down the stairs on your first day is a great way to get people to talk to you?)   

The Summit’s focus on community resilience, climate preparedness, and equity reflects the foundation of the NITC program: meaningful engagement, co-governance, and place-based solutions. The central theme of hope reminded me that climate work is most powerful when it is rooted in collective stories and communal, hands-on experiences.   

A workshop titled Re-Story-Ation emphasized “Experience > Explanation,” reminding us that people are moved less by data than by what they can feel, touch, and witness firsthand. Effective environmental storytelling invites emotional and embodied understanding, making space for community voices that hold both memory and expertise.  

This raised key questions: Where does local knowledge—like shared memories of unofficial community landmarks or a farmer’s multi-generational expertise—fit alongside technical expertise, like standardized historical and landmark processes and agricultural policy? And in the American South especially, how does cultural incompetency limit ecological understanding? 

Inside the Charleston Museum, a painting of a Confederate flag hung over our conference room. Romanticizing slavery like this implies that some lives (and some lands) hold less value, a hierarchy that still shapes environmental inequities today. When land is treated as expendable, the people closest to it (often Black and Indigenous communities) are treated as expendable too.   

At the Summit, I learned that across the South, many plantations have been converted into wildlife sanctuaries. We explored how this sort of interpretation of historical land use often prioritizes scenery over the lives of enslaved people who shaped those landscapes. This is why climate justice cannot be separated from racial justice; cultural competency in resilience planning requires acknowledging historical harm, and development—even towards something “good” like a wildlife sanctuary—that ignores community history, like slavery, risks repeating cycles of exclusion.  

My time in South Carolina affirmed that my professional project—a key part of the Early Career Fellowship experience—must center cultural inclusivity, belonging, and place activation. Storytelling and embodied practices like dance, humor, ritual, being with the land are all powerful tools that help us face climate grief and reconnect with one another.  

People are not the problem—disconnection is. And reconnection begins with stories that make change feel possible. My upcoming study will discern how to embed cultural development into place-making by studying the lived experiences community members have with open spaces. Through this work, I hope to further the ways we all show up for racial justice, for our neighborhoods, and for the urban landscapes we share, so our cities can become places where everyone knows they belong.  

Tami Gordon (they/them/theirs) is the Nature in the City Fellow for Cohort 4 (2025-2026). Tami works with the Nature in the City program staff and provides support to both the Boston Tree Alliance and Broadmeadow Brook. A recent graduate from Boston University’s Earth and Environmental Sciences program, Tami has been a lover of the environment since they were a child growing up with the stories of their Jamaican and Trinidadian household. When they’re not at work, you can find them making music, birding, or writing. 

By Isabella Acosta-Jimenez, Land Conservation Fellow

I used to think land protection was simple. At its core, I thought it meant safeguarding forests and wetlands from development. “Protection in perpetuity” sounded abstract until I joined Mass Audubon as this year’s Land Conservation Fellow, and I realized all that goes into it. Due diligence, legal agreements, and partnerships only lay the foundation, but conservation doesn’t end there. It’s a puzzle.  

It starts with people like me piecing together the “border” of the bigger land conservation puzzle—playing land detective and searching for opportunities to connect open space, parcel by parcel, story by story. Logistics and an interdisciplinary blend of fundraising, education, conservation science, and more all work in harmony to ensure land remains conserved and stewarded for generations. 

One way I do this is through participating in the Nashua Land and Waters Regional Conservation Partnership (RCP)—a powerhouse group of women who meet monthly to talk strategy. This partnership reinforces the idea that conservation is a collaborative and deeply community-based endeavor: conservation cannot happen if people don’t care. We ask: What does the local community want to protect? How do we meet landowners where they are, balancing their expectations while ensuring their land is conserved? And once it’s protected, how does the community want to engage with it?  

Through Mass Audubon’s 30×30 Catalyst Fund, seeded by MathWorks, we help smaller land trusts launch projects that reflect these priorities. Mass Audubon brings funding, expertise, and a spirit of collaboration to the table as we support organizations that work with community leaders and landowners to identify and elevate significant conservation opportunities.  

Recently, I visited a potential Conservation Restriction (CR) site in Springfield, an urban five-acre parcel that, frankly, was a bit grim: litter everywhere, blankets of invasive plants, spotted lanternflies sucking life out of trees, and signs of abandoned unhoused encampments. For the visit, folks came together from all corners: land protection specialists, the director of Mass Audubon’s Nature in the City program, city officials, and educators from both Mass Audubon and the National Park Service.  

Beforehand, I created maps to help us situate ourselves and understand the site’s larger context. As we walked the property and the surrounding area, we began reading the land and imagining its next chapter. What if the site could connect a nearby school to the adjacent protected space, allowing students to walk from their classrooms into greenspace and a restored wetland, where they could learn with and from nature? It’s just five acres, but it’s another puzzle piece—one that helps stitch together fragmented open space in Springfield.  

Land conservation often comes down to legal documents, title reviews, and GIS layouts. But it’s also standing in the field, imagining what nature could be and the impact that a relationship with nature could have. This cannot happen without site visits like the one in Springfield, which unite community voices on the ground and carve a path for land protection, management and engagement, once the land is secured.  

Conservation means aligning priorities, securing funding, and weaving partnerships to work towards a completed puzzle: finalized land projects. Every deed I review and every site I visit in this role reminds me that conservation is a puzzle—and I’m proud to be part of the team putting the pieces together. 

Isabella Acosta-Jimenez (she/her) is originally from New Jersey, where her passion for the outdoors grew from exploring trails and open space. She earned a B.S. in Environmental Studies with honors and a minor in Anthropology from Davidson College in 2024.  

In college, Isabella led affinity trips for students of color as part of Davidson Outdoors and completed an honors capstone applying geoarchaeological methods to reconstruct the environmental history of an ancient agricultural site in Cyprus. After graduating, she worked as an au pair in Italy, as an intern at an environmental policy think tank, and as an instructor at the Cathleen Stone Island Outward Bound School. These experiences have shaped her commitment to scientifically grounded, inclusive, and community-driven conservation.  

Outside of work, Isabella enjoys reading and exploring new places, near and far.

By Tiare Sierra Rivera, Ecological Restoration Fellow  

If I had to choose one word to describe the thread that runs through my career journey in environmental science, it would be “fascination.” To me, fascination is that feeling of being so wowed by something that you’re moved to take action on it. 

It is a force that has guided my childhood wonder into a professional purpose. My parents are both sailors, and growing up, learning about sailing was a fascinating experience. We would sail along the coast of Puerto Rico and beyond, all the way up to the US and British Virgin Islands. I wondered how the wind powered our boat, and what the birds, fish, and wildlife I saw were doing. Looking at the coast from the perspective of the ocean made me curious about how much impact the oceans had on the land. Every day was different, but I noticed patterns and made connections based on where and when we were sailing. I didn’t know it yet, but all of these were seeds—fascination moments—that led me to where I am today.  

My love of fascination became more apparent in college. As a freshman at Boston University, I was introduced to the mapping and data technology of geographic information systems, GIS, and remote sensing, the science of obtaining information from an area or object at a distance, from aircrafts or satellites. Soon, whenever I wondered “what? when? how? why?” I could pull out my computer and explore it using GIS.  These skills allowed me to answer questions that fascinated me, such as “how did mangrove forests in Puerto Rico spatially change after hurricanes?” and “how has urban space increased in tourism hotspots in Puerto Rico over the last 20 years?” 

Then came the summer before my junior year, when I was a coastal resiliency intern at Woods Hole Group, an environmental engineering company that provides services for coastal, ocean, wetland and terrestrial environments. On the very first day, I heard for the first time the term “marsh migration”: the natural process by which saltmarshes expand inland in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as rising sea levels. It was another fascination moment, one that shifted my focus and led me toward developing a professional project looking at salt marsh migration corridors across Cape Cod, using GIS.   

My fascinating experiences with GIS, remote sensing and coastal wetlands led me to find the Ecological Restoration Fellowship opportunity as I was applying for jobs after college. When I applied to the Mass Audubon Environmental Fellowship Program, I felt that same spark of excitement. I knew this opportunity would bring more moments of discovery and more chances to be amazed—and it has. Working with the Ecological Restoration team here at Mass Audubon, I’ve spent a lot of time learning about cranberry bog restoration, the process of returning retired cranberry farms, often built atop wetlands, to their natural state by removing agricultural modifications like ditches, dams, and sand, and allowing native ecosystems to recover.  

It fascinated me how, after a cranberry bog is turned barren using heavy machinery, no seeding or planting is needed in historic wetlands for native vegetation to regrow. It’s a reminder that the earth is magical, and that sometimes, the best thing we can do is step back and watch nature heal itself. 

Now, I wake up every morning driven by the same fascination that first took hold of me as a kid staring out at the coastline from a sailboat. That sense of wonder—of watching nature work in patterns, of asking “why?” and “how?”—fuels my work in ecological restoration today. It’s those moments of awe that keep me going and curious about what’s next. 

Tiare Sierra Rivera (she/her) grew up in Puerto Rico. She recently graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in Earth and Environmental Science, concentrating in GIS and remote sensing, and minoring in marine science. While at BU, she was a student-athlete on the sailing team, earning MVP honors two years in a row. 

Tiare’s environmental journey includes two summer internships in climate resiliency and environmental permitting, as well as a transformative summer experience conducting scientific diving research in Mozambique. During the academic year, she taught an accredited sailing course to fellow college students and served as a teaching assistant for an introductory environmental science class. 

During a fellows’ field trip with the Mystic River Watershed Association, I stared into a vial of river water as the color shifted from clear to purple to clear again, before sheepishly asking, “So…what does this actually tell us?” 

The educator kindly explained that we were measuring the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, and our sample indicated that the river had plenty for the fish and plant life to thrive that day.  

I felt a little embarrassed that I didn’t understand the Winkler Titration Method as well as my peers; my past work in environmental policy has often left me one of the most knowledgeable people in a room, and it’s been challenging, in my role as Mass Audubon’s Climate Education Fellow, to find myself in a climate-oriented environment and not know all the answers.  

But asking the “obvious” question is not a weakness. My job, I’ve learned, is less about having all the answers and more about modeling curiosity for the youth leaders that I support. 

Much of my time as the Climate Education Fellow is spent supporting Mass Audubon’s Youth Climate Leaders Program (YCLP), a program that empowers youth activists to lead and drive climate action across the state. Since starting in June, I’ve worked to strengthen the program’s structure—meeting with youth leaders, coordinating with coalition partners, and identifying gaps in onboarding and mentorship. I am also currently supporting the YCLP’s annual retreat, where youth leaders gather to share ideas, ask questions, and connect with one another. At this retreat, I’ll be leading a workshop on climate policy and advocacy, where interested youth leaders can begin exploring climate questions of their own.  

Recently, alongside the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition, YCLP leaders spearheaded H.560/S.391: An Act Implementing Elementary and Secondary Interdisciplinary Climate Literacy Education. I’m excited to help prepare them for an upcoming hearing and lobby day at the State House, drawing on my policy background to ensure their voices land powerfully. (Download this fact sheet to read more about the bill.) 

Outside of my day-to-day tasks within the Education Department, I’m challenging myself to interact with nature in ways that are new for me. Before this fellowship, nature was something I appreciated from afar; I have never been the type to dig in the dirt, poke around tidepools, or pick up periwinkles—now, that’s changing. As I help guide the questions that youth climate leaders are asking, I’m finding new questions myself.  

And while I may not always know the answers, I’m learning that the lesson is in the asking. 

Scarlett Gonzalez (she/her) is from rural Indiana, where her interest in environmental justice began through learning how the animal agriculture industry and labor rights intersect with environmentalism. In 2023, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and Environmental Studies from New York University.  

In college, Scarlett successfully encouraged her university to fully divest from fossil fuels as a member of the Sunrise Movement NYU chapter. She then worked with Rep. Raúl Grijalva and the House Natural Resources Committee as a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Fellow. 

In her free time, Scarlett enjoys kayaking, journaling, and visiting new coffee shops.