Summer 2022 Jeff Metcalf Ecological Assessment Research Internship
This internship is part of the University’s Jeff Metcalf Internship Program. Please review the Metcalf Interns’ Responsibility Notice to learn more about program requirements for Metcalf interns.
Please make sure that if selected for an interview, you communicate to your prospective host organization/employer where you will be physically located during the internship as your location may affect your (or your host organization/employer’s) ability to pursue this opportunity.
If you are an international student, please make sure to visit the OIA website to familiarize yourself with your work authorization eligibility and requirements as soon as possible. If you’d like to make an appointment with your international adviser, please visit this page.
Fellowship Award Amount: $4,000
Internship Time Commitment: approximately 400 hours
Open to all years
About Practice Landscape
Practice Landscape is a research and design collective dedicated to developing landscape practices that embrace experimentation in the face climate change. We work with the living environment as designers, researchers, and gardeners, revealing existing processes and carefully testing new methods and practices. We specialize in ecological assessment, landscape strategy, plant inventory, landscape design and planting, and collaborative research.
About The Project
An ecological assessment serves as a baseline, a way to measure, record and analyze the landscape. Initiated and utilized by designers, economists, developers and farmers, ecological assessments are intended to standardize and report on ecological processes and impacts, almost always in advance of construction and development, sometimes in anticipation of “restoration”.
In the era of climate change it is more important than ever to record and document benchmarks against which we can recognize changes in the land. Further, conventional metrics often miss the materiality of the landscape, the aliveness of plants, and the confluence of multiple timescales in their intersection .
Practice Landscape is developing a form of Ecological Assessment that pays careful attention to the dynamics often concealed underfoot and that evade direct experience. It might fall under the umbrella of site analysis but its lens, by necessity, extends beyond the lines of property. Critical to this evolution of the ecological assessment is placing our approach in context and in comparison with its precedents and predecessors.
About the Internship
The focus of the 8-10 week internship will be the creation of a white paper on ecological assessments. Working in a pair and in close collaboration with the Practice Landscape team you will conduct historic, archival, and comparative research on the range of methods for analyzing and measuring the landscape. Additionally, there will be opportunity to work remotely on an ecological assessment for an ongoing project in Northern Minnesota.
To apply, please provide a resume and short cover letter describing your interest addressed to Rosetta Elkin.