Forestry & Environmental Management

Dear colleagues, alumni and friends:

It is with pleasure that I write to you today to provide an update on the 2019-20 academic year here in UNB’s faculty of forestry and environmental management. We’re making great strides in a number of areas and have numerous initiatives on the go to help us achieve our mission of inspiring and preparing tomorrow’s forestry and environmental management leaders through experiential learning, discovery and collaboration.

Enrolment

We’ve had another strong year for student enrolment, with 94 new undergraduate and 36 new graduate students joining our programs. In total we now have over 300 undergraduate students and an all-time high of 127 graduate students.

High school recruitment

Our faculty is taking a new approach this year to inform high school students about what forestry and environmental management is all about. We’ve trained and funded several of our senior students to deliver education outreach modules in High Schools throughout Atlantic Canada.

While we expect this effort to help increase our applications, you, as alumni, serve as the faculty’s best ambassadors and our most loyal supporters. By sharing your personal experiences with a student, you can help inform and inspire them to pursue a degree in forestry or environmental and natural resources at UNB. We have developed an alumni info sheet to provide you with up-to-date information regarding our faculty, which may prove useful when discussing our programs.

New computer lab

To help facilitate effective, applied and high-tech learning within our larger class sizes, I’m excited to let you know that we’ve utilized donations from our alumni & friends, along with other support from UNB, to build UNB’s largest (70-seat capacity) computer lab on the bottom floor of the IUC Forestry building.

This new lab has been outfitted with the latest in computing technology and analytical software to ensure our students are able to learn state-of-the-art methods and tools used in forestry and environmental management today and into the future. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of those who have supported this and other initiatives with their financial and in-kind donations. Your support of our students and faculty is truly invaluable to our mission.

Curriculum review

We’re actively involved with several alumni and employers in reviewing and adjusting our program curricula to ensure our students have the disciplinary, professional and attitudinal competencies required for their careers today and in the future. I’d like to invite all of you who are willing to contribute to this important initiative to contact me to set up a time to talk.

• You can reach me at vlantz@unb.ca

Canada’s Truth & Reconciliation Committee (TRC) Calls to Action

Throughout the year, we’ve made several strides toward advancing our commitment to addressing some of Canada’s TRC calls to action for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians to repair the harm caused by residential schools and move forward with reconciliation. In particular, we’ve:

• Established a Faculty TRC committee who are working with our members to broaden our curriculum to include Indigenous history, traditions and knowledge as they relate to forestry and environmental management.

• Received two national funding agency grants to help support bringing Indigenous elders into our classrooms, Indigenous language into our hallways and indigenous knowledge into our student research projects.

• Received a third national funding agency grant to partner with first nations, government, NGOs and academic institutions in the Atlantic region and find ways to merge Indigenous Knowledge with Western science when implementing our forest research.

Atlantic Forest Research Collaborative (AFRC)

Atlantic Forest Research Collaborative (AFRC), our newly established collaborative, has realized a number of successes over the past year, with several ongoing collaborative projects, research knowledge transfers and promotion of professional development opportunities in the region. Visit the AFRC website for more information about this initiative.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our alumni, faculty, staff, students, partners and friends for their continued efforts in making our faculty a wonderful place to teach, research and study.

Sincerely,

Dr. Van Lantz
Dean, Faculty of Forestry and Environmental Management