Carleton students Mariah Casmey and Nicola Lowry conducted a study that identified the changes in land use and bird populations in Rice County. As land use changes are deeply interconnected with social and political shifts, they conducted a historical analysis of the area to further understand the agents driving these changes. They tracked changes in land use by using manual classification of aerial photographs and satellite imagery from 1964 to present. Through this analysis, they observed increasing urban land, increasing forest cover, and decreasing land in agriculture in our study region. Historical research revealed societal trends such as the loss of small family dairy operations and the industrialization of agriculture as drivers of some of these changes. Comparing bird species with varying habitat preferences revealed correlations between their population sizes and land use change in this area. The most significant correlation was the decline of grassland species that occurred alongside increasing agricultural industrialization and the loss of small family dairies. Overall, the study reveals how human land management decisions shape the assemblages of species that can live in these altered landscapes.

Carleton students Jeremy Alsaker and Cooper Kohlman studied how farmers relate to “spare or share” theory in a rural midwestern agricultural context. They interviewed farmers to ask them about their management practices that fall under spare or share, as well as the reasons for adopting the practices. While spare or share focuses solely on the objectives of the land’s productive capacity and biodiversity, they found that farmers’ objectives were more complex. Conservation theories such as spare or share should better reflect landscapes where small-scale, individual management decisions are informed by factors such as economic considerations, long-term fertility, and the notion of family legacy. This requires adapting the core assumptions of the theory to reflect the priorities of the farmers and other land users who interact with it.