School Notes: School of the Environment
March/April 2026

ELTI expands field training to Rwanda

Through the launch of a forest restoration field course in Rwanda, the Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative (ELTI) at the Yale School of the Environment is expanding its efforts to support local capacity for ecological restoration and sustainable development.

The course—Integrating Indigenous Species into Forest and Landscape Restoration in the Congo Nile Divide—brought together practitioners from across western Rwanda who are actively engaged in forest restoration and land management. Over four days, participants explored restoration sites across three districts, learning directly from community partners and conservation leaders.

“We wanted to create a living classroom where participants could explore not only the why of forest landscape restoration, but also the how,” said Grace Bachmann ’22MF, ELTI’s Rwanda-based program coordinator and a forest restoration technical advisor with the Wildlife Conservation Society. “In Rwanda, restoration has often meant large-scale tree planting, primarily with exotic species. This course helped reframe restoration as an ecological and social process that also values native biodiversity and community knowledge.”

Professor’s work featured on PBS

Coyotes in city parks. Raccoons in storm drains. Hawks perched on skyscrapers. As urban areas continue to expand, more than 80 percent of Americans now live in metropolitan regions that overlap with known wildlife corridors, according to the 2020 US Census. In cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston, coyotes, foxes, and even bobcats must learn to navigate traffic, artificial light, and human noise. Nyeema Harris, the Knobloch Family Associate Professor of Wildlife and Land Conservation, is asking how humans, too, can adapt. Her studies in Detroit were recently featured in an episode of PBS’s Wild Hope, looking at how the city’s wildlife is making a surprising comeback, how animals such as coyotes, raccoons, and skunks are adapting to urban life, and what it takes for people and wildlife to coexist.