Zoe Turner-Debs has been selected to fill the Adirondack Land Trust’s 2021 Internship for the Future of the Adirondacks. She will work this summer to apply geographic information system (GIS) skills in the field and in the office.
Originally from Providence, RI, Zoë will complete a bachelor’s degree in Earth science and society from Vassar College in June 2021 and plans to pursue a Master of Forestry centered around conservation management. She completed a semester at the School for International Training in Quito, Ecuador, studying development, politics and languages. Zoë has been a GIS teaching assistant for three semesters and was a research fellow at Vassar in summer 2020. In that role, she gathered and formatted data for the town of Poughkeepsie’s greenhouse gas inventory for the New York Climate Smart Communities program. In 2019, Zoë was an invasive species management intern for the 415-acre Vassar Ecological Preserve. In her spare time, she is a member of the Hudson Valley Mappers, participating in OpenStreetMap mapathons, and is part of Vassar’s Students for Equitable Environmental Decisions.
This summer Zoë will work with land trust staff to update and improve our maps of conservation areas. Her work will include using GPS technology in the field to locate boundaries and structures on private lands under conservation easement, followed by processing and organizing the data. She will also use GIS to support an Adirondack Land Trust project to identify and understand places with high potential to provide lasting conservation and public benefit.
The Adirondack Land Trust Internship for the Future of the Adirondacks was founded by conservationists Barbara Glaser and the late Clarence Petty (1905-2009), with the assistance of Clarence’s son Ed.