University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) alumnus Jason Taylor (MS ’04, PhD ’08) greets visitors to the Indiana Dunes National Park with a sweeping gesture to Lake Michigan and northwest Indiana. “Welcome to the land of sand and steel, a place where communities and industry that builds nations is directly adjacent to, and interwoven with, the fifth most biodiverse park in the entire national park system,” he explains. “It’s a land of contrast, challenge and opportunity.” 

As superintendent of the park, Taylor leads an “exceptional team” that is responsible for everything that happens within the park’s boundaries, from ecological stewardship and restoration to visitor engagement and experience. The park sits within three hours of about 30 million people, so in addition to stewarding the fifth most biodiverse national park, Taylor works every day to help make it “the people’s park.”

“My job is to protect the park, restore damages from the past, and share the park’s rich natural and cultural resources, to the extent we can, with as many people as we can,” Taylor explains. “The Indiana Dunes National Park is just a fantastic place. It really is.”

Advancing research that has societal impact

Taylor’s career hasn’t always been in Indiana, or in the Great Lakes region for that matter. His drive to make an impact and do meaningful work has taken him all over the globe, though his work began in Michigan. “I graduated with a biology degree from UM-Flint and started working for a local government as a geographic information systems (GIS) specialist,” says Taylor. He worked in that role for a few years, growing his skills in the relatively new technology at the time. “I knew the work I was doing was important,” he reflects, “but it wasn’t in my heart, so I decided to go back to school and learn how to apply my skills toward conservation and biological systems.” 

Taylor studied under Dan Brown, a former faculty member at SEAS who had a profound influence on him. “Thinking back, Dan deserves a lot of credit for where I am today. I applied to SEAS to work with and learn from him,” he notes. “In the years beyond my time at SEAS, and in my current career, I’m still leaning on lessons learned during my time with Dan, and I’m still talking with him, on occasion, today.” Working with Brown, Taylor realized he was excited to work on problems that mattered to society, those that would have an impact in the real world. “I feel like that’s what SEAS is all about: advancing meaningful, interdisciplinary research in ways that have a direct, societal impact.”  

Taylor’s master’s research studied the real-world implications of open-space planning strategies and the impacts those kinds of local government policies had on suburban landscapes. “The most important part of this research, to me, was sharing results with the community I was working with,” explains Taylor. “The community expressed thanks and gratitude for the work we were doing and they appreciated that we showed up.” 

Taylor’s PhD looked at the impacts of development to the natural world; he studied how the urbanization gradient between Ann Arbor and Jackson County, Michigan, impacted the ability of preserved natural areas, some in the city and some in more remote settings, to support birds. To measure this, Taylor studied migratory birds that required forest and tree cover to meet their life history needs. “Doing this work, I was able to use interdisciplinary skills gained at SEAS with ecology and conservation research techniques, blending old-school technology (observing birds with our ears) with new uses of tools, such as remote sensing and bioacoustic recording to conduct bird counts.” 

“Go somewhere you’re interested in and spend a few years living and working there”

After graduating from SEAS, Taylor had to decide if he wanted to remain in academia and apply for assistant professorship roles or apply his research skills in a different sector. Being from Michigan, Taylor felt the allure of the mountains and traveled west, to Colorado, to start his federal career working for the Bureau of Land Management. “There’s a two-part idea that comes up repeatedly and that has inspired me to move around: go somewhere you’re interested in and spend a few years living and working there,” says Taylor. “Somewhere you want to learn about the history, the culture and the ways of life. That, plus somewhere you can make a contribution that’s meaningful. The combination of those two ideas, interest and contribution, has driven my geographical and professional movements over the last 17 years.” 

From Colorado, Taylor moved around the U.S. West, Northeast and Alaska working in public land management and conservation research. In roles he has held, Taylor conducted or provided leadership to support science that could be used by society, policymakers and land managers to help make better decisions. “I’ve been very fortunate to work at the threshold of science and policy. That’s a happy place for me, trying to figure out how to get the right information to the right people at the right time in the right way to support making challenging decisions.” 

While moving around and in his different roles, Taylor contributed to leadership of the Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program (CBMP), which is a program within the Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna Working Group under the Arctic Council, a multinational coordination forum. Arctic Council membership includes the eight Arctic nations and six permanent participants, the Arctic Indigenous communities around the globe. In this capacity, Taylor served as the U.S. co-lead for the CBMP and for many years served as a U.S. representative for the terrestrial component. “It was a truly life-changing experience,” he says. In his roles with the CBMP and his time working in Alaska, Taylor learned about, and often experienced, Arctic Indigenous lifeways, cultures and perspectives, often much different than his own. This experience “developed in me a deep appreciation for different ways of knowing and understanding things. It changed me as a person and as a professional.”

Bridging science and stewardship

In the middle of his career, Taylor first worked for the National Park Service at Cape Cod National Seashore. “I’d always wanted to work for the Park Service from the first time, as a kid, I picked up a National Geographic book about our nation’s parks.” As chief of natural resources and chief scientist for the National Seashore, Taylor had the opportunity to engage in meaningful projects related to coastal erosion and endangered species management, as well as working with people who had strong personal connections to the park that spanned generations. 

After four years as director of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute in Montana, an interagency, federal research facility focused on wilderness and wildlands from Puerto Rico to Alaska, Taylor took on his current role as superintendent of Indiana Dunes National Park. He returned to the Great Lakes region, in part, to “try to use the experiences and lessons I’ve gained from different jobs, places and times across the nation and around the globe, to make a contribution back at home.”

Taylor shares his excitement for being in this role, reiterating the importance of doing meaningful work and having a lasting impact on a diverse and beautiful ecosystem. “Right now, we have sandhill cranes nesting in the park after a 70-year absence,” he says. “With a little love, energy and care poured into the once-degraded ecosystems of the park, we will be able to see the systems thrive again. The cranes are an early sign.”

Lessons learned at SEAS

Throughout his experiences across the world, some of the skills and lessons that Taylor learned during his time at SEAS have stuck with him. “Having an interdisciplinary education has shaped my ways of thinking and has given me an ability to consider and contribute to problems in different ways than folks with a discipline-specific perspective,” he reflects. “This kind of education has been critical to me in making meaningful contributions to the myriad projects and agencies I have been a part of throughout my career.” 

In addition to the interdisciplinary skills he developed at SEAS, Taylor has carried two mantras with him through his career. “The combination of earning a PhD and working with Dan [Brown] helped me to grow a lot. Most importantly, I learned that it’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know,’ because no person can know everything about any one thing, let alone everything about everything,” he explains. “Being able to comfortably say that you don’t know something is empowering and opens the door to learning.” 

Taylor also formed a friendship with SEAS grad and Research Specialist Geoff Lewis (MS ’94, MS ’01, PhD ’06), who shared with Taylor, “at a much-needed time during my PhD program,” the Latin phrase luctor et emergo. It roughly translates to “struggle and emerge,” which remained with Taylor throughout the challenges of his education and now, his career. “It’s not about how smart you are or what skills you have, Lewis said, but how persistent you’re willing to be and how hard you’re willing to work,” says Taylor. 

There were many other connections that Taylor made at SEAS that have influenced different aspects of his career and life, but he applies these phrases and lessons learned to all of his projects and regularly shares them with his colleagues and teams.