By Ronica Stromberg
Within three years of graduating from the School of Natural Resources, Wyatt Koehler took home its Early Career Excellence Alumni Award for showing a great impact in his field while still within 10 years of graduating. Not wanting to boast, Koehler pointed out after receiving the award on April 12 that he actually had almost 10 years of work in his field.
"I like to say I've been working in land conservation since I graduated high school," the 2022 graduate said. "So, my career, luckily, started early, and that's been a big benefit."
As the senior coordinator of habit management at Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, Koehler works with a team to manage 1,1600 acres of grassland. Since August 2024, he has been in charge of keeping the land clear of trees and invasive species through burning, grazing and other management techniques.
His land management experience started much earlier, though, when as a senior in a Minnetonka, Minnesota, high school, he headed out on spring break to take part in a fire academy in Salina, Colorado.
"It was very addictive almost because that fire academy allowed us to get live fire experience," he said. "Rather than just sitting and doing presentations and that sort of stuff, we actually got to go out, put fire on the ground."
His older sister was attending University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Koehler was offered a scholarship to Nebraska. He decided to pursue an education in natural resources, starting in hydrology in fall 2016. To pay for college, he continued working summers and took breaks to fight forest fires for the federal government. With Nebraska’s central location, he was able to move quickly to places as distant as Suffolk, Virginia, and Challis, Idaho.
Arriving back from one of his breaks from college to make money, he learned the School of Natural Resources had started the Regional and Community Forestry program.
Read the rest of the story at https://snr.unl.edu/aboutus/what/newstory.aspx?fid=1258