UHPSI research assistants, Alexia Zolenski and Jack Newman, are investigating producer (farm and ranch) responses to grasshopper and Mormon cricket outbreaks in central and eastern Montana and eastern Oregon. Every year, grasshopper and Mormon cricket outbreaks cause significant economic damage and defoliation to western rangelands. Simultaneously, the strategies employed in managing these outbreaks, from pesticide application to land management techniques like prescribed fire or rotational grazing, each come with costs, benefits, and environmental consequences. Alexia and Jack will conduct a survey and interview producers to understand the methods they chose to implement to respond to outbreaks and the reasoning behind them. Jack and Alexia will summarize data and finding in a report that will be shared with interviewees and interested organizations, such as the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.
Jackson Newman – Research Assistant and WCC Coordinator | Jackson is a master’s in environmental management candidate specializing in ecosystem conservation and management. Prior to Yale, Jackson was a community organizer in eastern Montana for a conservation and family agriculture non-profit. Jackson is particularly interested in private lands conservation, prairies, commodity markets, land ownership, restoration, and lots more. His favorite quote is “there are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land” by Aldo Leopold. See what Jackson has been up to.
Alexia Zolenski – Research Assistant | Alexia (Lexi) Zolenski is a joint JD/Master of Environmental Management candidate at Yale
School of the Environment and Vermont Law School. While in law school, she interned with the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center in Detroit, Michigan and was a summer associate at the nation’s foremost environmental law firm. Before law school, Lexi worked as a park ranger for the National Park Service at Utah’s Zion National Park and Alaska’s Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, where she could be spotted giving enthusiastic interpretive programs, imploring park visitors to “not bust the crust” and “give plants a chance,” or snowshoeing down a steep pitch along the South Klondike Highway on her way to conduct a snow survey. Her interests bridge the sciences and the arts, the local and the global, and include environmental justice,
international environmental law, public lands, and facilitating compassionate conversation between stakeholders—particularly in western landscapes. Lexi received her Bachelor of Science from the University of Notre Dame, double majoring in Biological Sciences and History. She is a connoisseur of coffee and biscuit breakfast sandwiches, prefers sedimentary rock over metamorphic or igneous, and will hike up any hill in her immediate vicinity.
