Joshua Cohen has worked for the past 25 years as an ecologist with Michigan Natural Features Inventory. His primary duties involve refining and revising the natural community classification through ecological inventory and sampling, literature research, and data analysis. He is responsible for classifying conservation targets and prioritizing areas for conservation and restoration; creating and delivering biodiversity and ecosystem management trainings; and designing and conducting vegetative sampling, ecological mapping and modeling, monitoring, and surveys for natural communities and rare species. Cohen is the lead author of A Field Guide to the Natural Communities of Michigan and recent articles in Diversity and Ecological Modelling entitled “Assessing the Ecological Need for Prescribed Fire in Michigan Using GIS-Based Multicriteria Decision Analysis: Igniting Fire Gaps” and “Using GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis to prioritize invasive plant treatment: A creative solution for a pernicious problem”, respectively. He is inspired by the words of Baba Dioum: “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.”

TSN Conference 2026

• January 22nd, 2026 (Thursday) // 1:45 pm – 2:45 pm // Room 104 // Guarding Treasures: A Guide for Assessing Habitat Conditions to Inform Your Management Responses // Protecting land provides the opportunity for conserving habitats and connecting with nature, but stewardship is needed to complete and act on those opportunities. Stewardship can be defined very simply as “wise care” and wisdom requires considering all the facts. Inherent then in stewardship, is the need to have deep knowledge of the lands that are being cared for. We can conserve what we know. This session aims to help land managers with large land holdings develop a framework for gathering ecological knowledge to steward wildlife and their habitats. You are busy and have many responsibilities; being an ecologist is not easy, but we will show why it is necessary and provide examples, ideas, and techniques for how to increase your awareness about the ecological health of the lands you manage and engage in larger landscape-scale conservation. Knowledge-is-key, while a cliché, is vital to identifying degraded lands and then restoring them.

• January 23rd, 2026 (Friday) // 11:20 am – 12:20 pm // Red Cedar Room // Setting the Straits on Fire – Part II // Through a cooperative agreement with the USFWS, the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians (LTBB), MNFI, & MSU Department of Forestry are reconstructing fire histories in culturally significant sites in MI’s Straits Region. Last year our team provided a broad overview of our research. This year we will prove that sequels can be as compelling as the original. After a full field season of dendrochronological sampling, we will dig into the results for forests with unique fire histories in Waganakising, LTBB’s homeland. Mae Wright, LTBB’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, will join us & provide an overview of the cultural context of the study area & interpretation of the results based on oral histories & archival research. Through collaborative sampling we are increasing literacy about cultural burning, fire ecology, & dendrochronology with the goal of returning Good Fire to the Straits to increase landscape resilience, ecological integrity, co-management, & cultural heritage.