Sarah Anderson ’10 honored as ESA Early Career Fellow

Sarah Anderson ’10 has been selected as one of the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) 2025 Early Career Fellows for her landscape ecology work.

“Receiving this recognition is truly humbling,” Anderson said. “To have your entire professional community recognize the work you do is significant, especially when my work doesn’t quite measure up to the normal metrics. My work in land management does not leave time or support for traditional research and publishing of scientific articles.”

According to the Ecological Society of America’s article, Anderson’s “mentorship and policy experience illustrate the translational potential of ecological expertise within governmental frameworks.”

Anderson has worked for the Forest Service, a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for more than seven years. Her current title is natural resource specialist, with duties that require her to be an ecologist.

She sits in the National Forest System, the branch of the agency responsible for managing 193 million acres of National Forests and Grasslands, which are public lands stretching from Alaska to Florida including the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin.

“My primary job is to coordinate the team that updates an ecological model used to assess conditions on the lands the agency manages, and we use that information to estimate the effect of management activities and report that to Congress annually,” Anderson said.

She also assists with several other programs including a national soils program, ecological mapping efforts and the national reforestation program in which she led the writing of the National Forest System Reforestation Strategy in 2022.

To be recognized as an Early Career fellow, nominees are required to be within eight years of receiving their Ph.D. and demonstrate excellence and potential for future excellence of contributions to one or several of the following areas: (1) research and discovery, (2) communication and outreach; education and pedagogy, (3) application of ecology to management and policy.

“My contributions fell primarily under the third category of applying ecology and ecological knowledge to management and policy,” Anderson said. “The ESA, historically, has placed more emphasis on the first category (research), so it is truly an honor as someone whose contributions have been nearly exclusively in a different category to be recognized with this honor.”

Anderson hopes to attend the ESA Annual Meeting this August in Baltimore to be recognized and receive the award in person.

She graduated from Ripon College with a major in biology and minors in chemistry and French, and she received a Ph.D. in biology from Washington State University. She said her skills, knowledge and ability to think critically and in interdisciplinary ways were honed at Ripon.

“Ripon College contributed in very direct ways from research experiences with biology faculty through the McNair Scholars program, working in the biology department and becoming a competent technical writer in all of my science courses across Farr Hall (now the Franzen Science Center),” Anderson said. “Indirectly, I met my husband and many of my best friends at Ripon, and without the support and love from family and friends, I certainly would not have done all that I have been able to do.”

Anderson was also honored with an Outstanding Young Alumni Award from Ripon in 2020.

“Servant leadership was the graduation theme the year I graduated, and it is a theme that resonated with me and reflected my values at the time, and it continues to do so,” Anderson said. “I pursued federal civil service to be able to put my learning, skills and ability to service for the American people. My intention is to continue to do that despite the uncertainty and upheaval of the moment, and it is almost in spite of this chaos, that my professional peers across employment sectors, specialities and career stages have recognized my work and contributions to the field of ecology. It is humbling indeed.”