Nell Larson is ready for a new adventure after serving for the past decade as the executive director of the Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter.
At the end of the month, Larson will start her life’s new chapter in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where she will join the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the 16 research and development facilities overseen by the United States Department of Energy.
“I’ll lead and further develop its new Enduring Environmental Stewardship program,” she said. “They have been doing this work for years, and are trying to take a new approach and strategy. I’m excited to work again in conservation and restoration.”
David Kizer, the Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter’s board chair, said in a press release that the organization was fortunate to have been led by Larson.
“She has driven enormous growth and development for the organization through the introduction of major new programs and innovative projects as well as successful fundraising to strengthen our ability to serve a larger community of people,” he said.
Larson knows the skills she learned while working at the Swaner EcoCenter will help with her career pivot.
“In my role as executive director and role on this green Earth has helped me become a better communicator about our environment with out getting into the scientific gobbledygook,” she said.
The job also marks Larson’s return to the world of science and land management, which aligns with her master’s degree in environmental management, ecology, she earned at the Yale School of Forestry, now known as the Yale School of the Environment.
In fact, Larson’s interest in ecology is what brought her to the Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter as an intern in 2006 in the first place.
“I had just finished my master’s program, and had another plan lined up,” she said. “But I saw a job posting about being the strategic conservation intern here. So I called and learned more about it, and within a few weeks I was moving out here for a three-month internship.”
During that time the nonprofit’s administration was figuring out how the preserve should be managed, what the potential was, what kind of shape it was in, the land-parcel history and what was required to move forward, Larson said.
“I came on to sort of dig into that, and it was super exciting for me, because that’s what I studied,” she said. “I’ve always been interested in the on-the-ground impacts.”
After the internship wrapped, the preserve’s director at the time, Colleen Reid Rush, offered Larson a full-time position.
“I said, ‘Thank you, but I really can’t see committing to more than a year, and she said, ‘Great. Why don’t you stay for a year?” Larson said.
At the end of that year, Rush checked back with Larson.
“She said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?'” Larson said with a laugh. “She knew they had me.”
Larson’s first job post internship was land and education manager.
“I helped programs across the board — youth education, adult education, field trips, tours and conservation work,” she said. “Then I became the conservation director where I was overseeing the preserve as a whole, and setting strategy there.”
At the end of 2013, Larson was promoted to executive director, replacing John Paulding.
“It was a huge time of transition for the organization,” she said. “We saw some changes in leadership and changes in priorities. We also gifted ourselves to Utah State University in 2010, so there was so much possibility. I was excited about what we could do here and all that could happen.”
During Larson’s tenure, the Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter’s 1,200-acre wildlife refuge and 10,000-square-foot environmental education facility became a fixture in the local landscape through local, hands-on programming, story times, exhibits and education.
“As I look back, that has sort of been through incremental growth,” she said. “When I started, we only had one other full-time staff member in addition to me. So we decided to fund raise enough to build a program and bring on one more staff member, and we did that again and again. We now have a team of eight full-time people, and our budget and impact has grown.”
Through the years, the EcoCenter expanded its field-trip program from including every fourth grader in Summit County to additional grades in both Summit and Wasatch counties, and introduced its traveling exhibition program, which has increased visitation by 500%, Larson said.
“When the Swaner EcoCenter first opened, we were more like a program center,” she said. “We had our permanent exhibitions, but people came here to attend a talk and participate in a program.”
Recent traveling exhibits, correlated through Hunter Klingensmith, that have come through the EcoCenter’s doors include the exotic-animal showcase, “Survival of the Slowest,” “Soar with Bats” and the miniature golf-inspired “Fore! The Planet.”
“That program has been a fun one to grow,” Larson said. “We were able to learn about the museum world, attend museum conferences, and learn about best-practices for science centers. It has been really rewarding.”
Another initiative Larson helped usher in was an endowment, which provides funds to support the nonprofit’s conservation work, overseen by Conservation Director Rhea Cone.
“We introduced a research element to our work to broaden the impact, so we are not just only looking at the preserve anymore,” Larson said. “We’re looking watershed-wide and region-wide, and finding out how we can support others who are just getting started in this area, or private landowners who don’t have a background in environmental management. They can take some of our lessons we learned here and take that back to their work.”
Falling under the conservation work on the Preserve include the more than 100 beaver dam analogs, which are stream-restoration techniques that were introduced in 2013, Larson said.
“I contacted a professor who was doing research about them, because I was looking for a way to keep water in the wetlands and in the streams longer so they wouldn’t dry up,” she said. “I had to drive to Idaho and Montana to learn how to do this and bring it back.”
Maintaining the Preserve will always be the Swaner Preserve & EcoCenter’s goals, Larson said.
“We do active restoration in some places, and we have seen passive restoration, where the land is rebounding on its own, in other areas,” she said.
Active restoration includes invasive weed management and the beaver dam analogs, Larson said.
“The beaver dam analogs don’t require a lot of technology or money, and are really effective,” she said. “Those can proliferate and have an out-sized impact for the amount of resources we put into them.”
Passive restoration occurred after crews filled in six miles of agricultural drainage ditches that were on the land in the early 200s, Larson said
“(By keeping the water on the Preserve) we’ve seen neat results like native willow stands coming back on their own, and the return of wildlife, like nesting sandhill cranes and the increase of shore and migratory birds,” she said. “Seeing more water on the preserve and more water in East Canyon Creek because of those projects has been incredibly rewarding. Conservation work is close to my heart, and seeing the way the preserve is now is really special to me.”
Although Larson loves the EcoCenter’s work on the environment, the things she’ll miss most are her staff and the local community.
“I think what I’m most proud of here is building this amazing team of people,” she said. “As executive directors, we get compliments, but most of the time the thanks needs to go to the people on the ground doing the work, building the programs or running the projects. They inspire me so much. They are all smart, creative and collaborative, all the things you want to see in a team.”