RISING LEADERS: LEANDER SWAN
BY AMANDA MARTINO
This past summer the Blue Mountain Land Trust (BMLT) was fortunate to have a stewardship and monitoring intern assist with conservation work. Leander Swan, a junior at Whitman College majoring in Environmental Studies and Sociology, joined the conservation team for ten weeks.
Swan worked directly with Conservation Director Amanda Martino and Conservation Specialist Genevieve Perdue to visit BMLT’s protected properties for annual compliance monitoring. He hiked over 13,260 acres of protected lands, captured monitoring photos, talked with landowners, and created reports of collected data to identify any areas of concern. Swan quickly became a mapping expert and helped update the database system with photo point maps.
At the end of the summer, Swan helped the team complete baseline documentation at BMLT’s new property, Phipps Meadow, by taking GPS data and photos across the landscape. He was an inquisitive, kind, dedicated, and hardworking addition to the staff and brought his passion for the environment and local communities to his work every day. The bar is set high for future stewardship and monitoring interns, and BMLT wishes him the best of luck with his studies this year.