Current Position: Resource Management Coordinator for Indiana State Parks & Reservoirs.
How long have you been with the Indiana Division of State Parks and Reservoirs and in what capacity?
A total of 11 years. Positions have included: seasonal interpretive naturalist, seasonal trail crew, seasonal administrative assistant, seasonal resource management specialist, full-time interpretive naturalist, and my current position. Like many folks in our agency, I got started doing seasonal work during the summers.
How did you become involved in working as a Resource Management Coordinator?
The first park I worked at was Turkey Run State Park in west-central Indiana. I was a seasonal interpretive naturalist. As a naturalist, I spent most of my time leading hikes and working with the public in many educational ways such as designing signs and brochures. Steep sandstone canyons and old growth forests abound at this property, very similar to what settlers would have seen as they made their way northward through Indiana in the 1820’s. While working there, I developed an appreciation of botany that led to my interest in listed (rare, threatened, and endangered) plants which are very common at this park. Through learning more about each of the many listed species protected at the park, it became clear to me that their presence was the result of specific conditions in different natural communities and the ecological quality therein. Many of these communities are today unique and rare throughout much of Indiana.
This started a profound interest in different natural communites such as prairies, savannas, bogs and fens and their management/restoration toward a presettlement condition. I began to focus on spending a lot of personal time traveling around and seeing first-hand as many high quality natural areas (least afected by man) in Indiana as I could. I learned a lot about the different kinds of flora and fauna present in each and how they function upon one another within their respective communities.
As time passed, and I worked at other Indiana State Parks and made my way through college, I realized that though I enjoyed working with the public as an interpretive naturalist, I wanted to concentrate my career solely on resource management. Though I’ll always take any chance I can to lead a hike or talk with a group, I love being directly involved full-time with protecting, restoring, and perpetuating native landscapes and wildlife resources across our 33 diverse state parks and reservoirs.
Describe a typical day at your job.
(If there is no such thing as a typical day, then please tell us about your primary responsibilities and duties.)
I don’t know that any one day has been the same as another. My primary duty is helping our properties get resource management on the ground and working. This might be lining things up to purchase additional land, providing funding, planning prescribed fire, or advice about how to handle different issues such as invasive species, nuisance wildlife, or forest health. I also try to find partnerships and promote our management efforts to the public. Of course, there are also a lot of less than glamorous clerical and administrative duties as well.
How many hours a week do you work in this position?
I spend a lot of time traveling around the state to our different properties and working in the field. At the same time, I have a lot of office work to get done. In order to accomplish all this and stay productive, I currently average about 57 hours a week.
What aspects of your job do you enjoy the most?
Variety! In my experience, many folks in our field can’t decide between natural areas type work and wildlife management work. It’s nice that our division of state parks and reservoirs does both. Half of my job is natural areas management and the other half is wildlife management. Our state parks focus on managing natural areas and maintaining ecological integrity – hunting is only allowed when necessary. Our reservoirs, on the other hand, deal primarily with managing wildlife populations to provide quality hunting opportunities through utilizing food plots and manipulating forest succession.
Whether it’s assisting one of our parks with battling issues resulting from invasive plants or helping a reservoir with administrative work to have a productive dove season, each day and season is different. I also simply enjoy any opportunity to help our different properties accomplish their goals on behalf of the resources and our visitors.
What do you find to be the greatest challenges of your job?
I think people may be the biggest challenge of my job. Our state parks and reservoirs have many stakeholders, folks who are very involved or concerned with how these areas are managed. Whether it’s the people working at our different properties or the visitors and surrounding communities, there are a lot of different opinions about how our natural resources should be managed. It can be very challenging to find consensus or decide priorities regarding many issues that everyone is comfortable with.
What kind of training/schooling is required in your position?
A bachelor’s degree in one of the more applied natural sciences (forestry, wildlife biology, fisheries, etc.). I studied natural resource management at Purdue’s school of Forestry and Natural Resources. Though I enjoyed the mix of forestry, wildlife management, human dimensions, etc., in this particular program, my passion and focus was on plant ecology.
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