Jessica L'Roe

Jess L’Roe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography. She studies the tradeoffs inherent in balancing environmental and welfare concerns across different groups of people and different generations. She earned her BS in Environmental Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, near her hometown of Raleigh, NC. After graduating, she worked in the Peruvian Amazon as a Fulbright Fellow studying forest-resource dependence in indigenous communities. Upon returning she served in an AmeriCorps land protection internship with a conservancy in the southern Appalachian Mountains. She recently completed master’s degrees in Conservation-Development Studies and in Agricultural & Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her master’s research focused on measuring unintended consequences of environmental regulation on local incomes and land use decisions in Peru and Brazil. In 2011, she managed a study on impacts of crop-raiding on villages around a national park in western Uganda and became invested in and intrigued by the challenges and opportunities for people there. With support from a Scott Kloeck-Jensen award, she plans to return to these communities to conduct dissertation research on changes in their land holdings and land use strategies in response to economic development and conservation initiatives around the park.