Avery Anderson, who works for the Santa Fe-based Quivira Coalition, is one of 40 people from around the country selected for the National Audubon Society's TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Program.

The fellows receive specialized training in conservation planning and a $10,000 award toward a community-focused project.

Anderson is the coordinator of the Quivira Coalition's Conservation and Ranch Leadership and Youth program. Before taking that job, she worked as a field assistant for the Wyoming Wolf Project and as a field researcher in Kenya's Amboseli-Tsavo West ecosystem. She also worked as a children's environmental-science teacher at the Urban Resources Institute in Connecticut.

Anderson will focus on restoring a degraded section of the Dry Cimarron River in northeastern New Mexico for her fellowship project, according to information from Audubon. She will work on improving water quality and supply to the river through on-site workshops that reach out to the ranching community.

Anderson received a master's degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her master's project looked at the carnivore-livestock conflict in Wyoming and will be published in a book, Large Carnivores, People and Governance.

The TogetherGreen Fellowship was launched by Audubon with support from Toyota in March. "Avery is the kind of person who can make a real difference in the health of our environment and the quality of our future," said Audubon President John Flicker.

The Quivira Coalition was founded more than a decade ago by two Sierra Club members and a rancher to find common ground between ranchers and environmentalists.

For more information, see http://www.togethergreen.org/.