Bullard Spotlight: Noah Charney on What Shapes a Landscape

Bullard Fellow Noah Charney spent his year-long fellowship at the Forest working on a book to engage general audiences with multi-layered stories of nature. Centered around photographs of real field sites, the book weaves personal narratives together with the clues visible in the images to reconstruct underlying ecological processes. His intention is for readers to think about how geology, soils, climate, plants, animals, and humans all coalesce to shape a landscape. The narratives will also explore local challenges to conservation and human relationships to nature.

The project reflects Charney's multidisciplinary work teaching natural history, directing a conservation nonprofit, authoring nature guides and publishing basic research on wildlife ecology, evolution and climate change.  

Charney describes Harvard Forest as the ideal platform for writing this book, given its emphasis on understanding how modern landscape ecologies are shaped by the past, as well as its collaborative community of field-based scholars working at the interface of academia and applied conservation. While writing the book in residence at the Forest, Charney says, he regularly integrated ideas from HF seminars, colleagues, and ongoing initiatives like Wildlands and Woodlands.  

• Learn more about Noah Charney's work.
• Learn more about the Bullard Fellowship Program.