By Ronica Stromberg
Senior student Natalia Hagen is working to combine wildlife conservation and foreign languages in a career.
"Bringing those two things together is kind of where I see myself in the future," she said about her plans after graduating from the School of Natural Resources in May.
A Brazilian-American with family ties to Brazil and Peru, she grew up speaking English, Portuguese and Spanish with family and friends. She chose to learn Japanese in eighth grade and high school in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and continued those studies as a Japanese minor at Nebraska. This past summer, she took part in a World Unite! project that gave her the best of her major, fisheries and wildlife, and her minor.
She went to Japan June 19-July 30, visiting Tokyo three days, carrying out her World Unite! project on Sado Island over five weeks and then visiting Osaka a couple of days to see friends she had made at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when they were visiting on an exchange program. In her project, which she had found online and set off for by herself, she and other volunteers from around the world stayed at the Chokokuji temple at night and, during the day, worked on conservation projects around Sado Island.
Hagen mainly worked to improve water quality and access near rice fields for the crested ibis. The bird almost went extinct in the 1900s because of overhunting and habitat loss, she said. She and other volunteers used shovels to dig irrigation canals around the fields to support invertebrate life for the ibis.
They also picked up trash on Wednesdays on a beach behind an ocean-backed restaurant and built a playground nearby from bamboo. Later, they visited an elementary school and spent time with fourth graders, helping them improve their English while playing a Japanese version of dodgeball.
Read more of Natalia's story and see more pictures at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1219