Biographical Information

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
- Rumi, Sufi poet

The words above sum up why Rachelle Gould is working with E-IPER. Forest, grassland, beach, marsh, you name it: she loves the complex beauty of those worlds – beauty that results from their complex ecologies and from the inter-related spiritual, psychological, and tangible “life support” services that those ecologies provide.

While she loves tromping around forests, she spent most of her undergraduate years working on bringing environmental concerns into the busy minds of her student peers through Harvard’s Resource Efficiency Program. She graduated Harvard with a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy and lots of experience sorting through trash cans and turning off unused lights.

After undergrad, she worked in south-central Chile with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and local organizations; her work involved coordinating with various stakeholders in a biological corridor project, and also on understanding the speedy Chilean accent. She then worked briefly with TNC in Washington State, where she once again worked with residents on managing the places they live from and love.

She then pursued a Master’s of Forest Science degree at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. She explored the importance of Non Timber Forest Products to different segments of Bhutan’s population. The applied element of this project was a partnership with that small Himalayan country’s emerging Ugyen Wangchuck Environment and Forestry Institute; her results provide support for the incorporation of non-timber uses of the forest into its curriculum.

Research Interests

Rachelle’s work at E-IPER centers around “ecosystem services” (benefits that natural landscapes provide to humans such as water quality, air quality, flood control, pollination and pest control, erosion control, carbon sequestration, and aesthetic/emotional/spiritual benefits). She focuses on forest restoration in Hawaii, and is investigating both the biophysical and the social aspects of this phenomenon. Her biophysical work aims to provide useful feedback and direction to landowners interested in restoration. In one project, she is investigating what kinds of fauna (particularly, wasps in the family Ichneumonidae) recolonize recently planted stands of trees. In a second project, she is conducting an experiment to see how different native understory tree species survive in different levels of light and in the presence of a native fern (which is the only native plant consistently able to out-compete introduced pasture grasses).

Rachelle’s emerging work tries to pry open the tricky 'black box' of cultural/aesthetic/spiritual/psychological” benefits – a type of ecosystem service that most humans recognize as integral to well-being, but a type that nobody’s quite sure how to summarize, encapsulate, or analyze. She is now embarking upon analyses of Cultural Ecosystem Services, with field work focused on land slated for development in Hawaii.

Through this work and work to come, Rachelle hopes to create a dynamic communication between the world of implementation and the world of academia. She greatly values the work that citizens, NGOs, and government agencies are doing on the ground, and will work to make those efforts as vibrant and as lesson-filled as they can be!