Creating Corridors for Amphibians and Reptiles

Imagine you are an eastern box turtle living near Duke’s campus. You thrive in the New Hope Creek watershed, hunting insects and foraging for berries. But your historic habitat is much larger than the section of Duke Forest in which you live. If you venture out in search of resources or a mate, will you make it to one of the Triangle’s many other nature preserves? Or will you be flattened crossing a busy road?

As Sara Childs, director of Duke Forest, put it, “The land we steward has to be part of a connected natural network, not just a set of green islands.” Childs and Nicolette Cagle, a senior lecturer at the Nicholas School of the Environment, share an interest in making sure animals can move between protected areas. They have long-standing engagement with Triangle Land Conservancy and the Triangle Connectivity Collaborative, community organizations working to overcome habitat fragmentation with strategies such as wildlife corridors. Box turtles and salamanders are key indicator species, and gathering data on their movements could help stakeholders evaluate modeled corridor priorities and plan future conservation actions.

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Across campus, Childs invited Shannan Hayes, associate director of undergraduate engagement at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, to join a workshop hosted by Indigenous-led environmental justice organization 7 Directions of Service. The workshop explored a Rights of Nature framework for understanding ecology and conservation. Through this lens, animals are viewed not as objects to be used or studied, but as beings with rights — including the right to move.

Having discovered the intersection of their interests, Childs, Cagle and Hayes, along with Nicholas School lecturing fellow Clay Noss and Ph.D. student Caroline Rowley, are leading a Bass Connections project in the 2026-2027 school year. The team will apply a Rights of Nature approach and other ethical frameworks to the task of tracking turtles and salamanders in central North Carolina. But before they could begin, the project’s leaders had to figure out how to build corridors between their various disciplines.

Their starting point, Childs explained, was becoming “students of each other’s work.” They have done shared readings, completed 7 Directions of Service’s online modules and discussed the insights of their disciplines. While Childs and Cagle bring expertise in wildlife tracking and traditional scientific frameworks for conservation, Hayes contributes her background in discourse analysis, critical theory and the practice of questioning what it means to know. 

In addition to learning from each other, the leaders have established concrete strategies for the logistics of collaboration. “Interdisciplinarity is not just something that’s going to magically happen once students are in the room,” Cagle said, “so we're trying to build scaffolding. We're co-creating a 26-week schedule with the aim of having the leaders attend every full-team meeting. We've outlined subteam roles and workflows, and discussed up front who is responsible for which pieces of the project.”

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Students’ learning is just as important as research outputs, and these leaders are planning for all team members to experience each aspect of the project. While the project will operate in three subteams — data collection, GIS analysis and ethics — all students will participate in field work, ethics case studies and other shared activities. By attending full-team meetings, students will have a chance to share their subteams’ work and learn from others. All members will practice leadership and communication, while graduate students, in particular, will learn mentorship skills.

One of the most important goals of the project is for students to appreciate approaches to conservation they may not usually encounter in natural science classes. “We feel really confident that each of them will walk away with some interdisciplinary notions around conservation and practice and ways of knowing that they hadn’t considered before,” said Childs.

“Part of the work is about bringing to the surface the ethical presumptions that are already latent in knowledge claims,” Hayes explained. This project gives students and leaders alike the chance to look at their own work through different eyes. Hayes added, “I think what I'm really excited about is learning and practicing ecological ways of knowing, trying to think like the turtle.”

Collaborating across disciplines is a challenge, and the team leaders noted that they will need to keep checking in with each other and the students throughout the year. They are continuing to work on setting milestones and determining assessment methods, and students will participate in the creation of subteam goals.

Still, Cagle, who has led multiple Bass Connections projects in the past, keeps coming back to the program: “It's so worth it. The outcomes feel more impactful, I feel more intellectually stimulated and I've grown a lot in my own knowledge base. It leads to new connections, leads to new projects. It can be really invigorating to make actual interpersonal connections — dare I say, friendships — with people in other departments.”

Perhaps scholars need connectivity just as much as box turtles do. 

Learn More

• Explore additional Bass Connections news and updates.
• Browse team-authored profiles from 2025-2026 Bass Connections project teams.
• Explore additional project teams for 2026-2027.

Main image: Students walk through Duke Forest, which includes 7,000 acres of land in Durham, Orange and Alamance counties. The site has been managed for teaching and research purposes since 1931. (Photo: Jared Lazarus)