The Institute of Foresters of Australia has announced the winner of The Prince of Wales Award for Sustainable Forestry for 2018 is Erin Hodgson. Source: Timberbiz
Vice-President of the Institute of Foresters of Australia Mr Rob de Fégely said: “His Royal Highness has a well-known passion for forests and natural production systems, a passion he shares with this year’s winner, Erin Hodgson.”
Ms Hodgson completed a Bachelor of Horticulture at the University of Melbourne in 2009 and later completed a Masters of Forest Ecosystem Science degree also at the University of Melbourne.
As part of her studies, she travelled to Europe for a 6-month exchange to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences where she learned about European silvicultural systems and management.
Since completing her Master’s degree, Erin has been working as a projects forester and is chair of the IFA’s Future Foresters Initiative and a director on the board of the Institute of Foresters of Australia.
“Erin has already made outstanding contributions to forest professionalism most particularly through her leadership and participation in the Future Foresters’ Initiative which provides support to students and early career professionals through mentoring, training, networking and other social and professional development activities,” Mr de Fégely said.
“His Royal Highness wants to encourage greater awareness of the importance of sustainably managing the world’s forests and training and creating a network of young foresters who will manage them professionally.
“It is critically important that we continue to train professional forest managers who have the broad range of skills that early foresters were trained for to manage our forests for production or conservation purposes. To rely on people with only specialist skills such as ecologists or botanists would be like trying to manage our health system without General Practitioners.”
