St. Lawrence professor awarded grant to study community satisfaction in Adirondacks

CANTON - A St. Lawrence University professor will use a $74,639 grant from the Northeastern States Research Cooperative to study factors contributing to community satisfaction in the Adirondack Park.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Erik A. Backlund has been awarded the grant for the project, titled "Community Well-Being, Satisfaction and Attachment in the Adirondacks."

He plans to analyze the factors contributing to "variation in socio-economic well-being" that exist in the region, focusing on the effects of amenities such as recreation opportunities, natural landscapes, tourism facilities and residents' attachment and social bonds.

Backlund plans to study census and other already available data, and conduct surveys. The grant funding will allow him to hire undergraduates as assistants to collect and analyze the data that will be used in the study, expected to continue through the summer of 2012.

The Northeastern States Research Cooperative is a competitive grant program that supports cross-disciplinary, collaborative research in the Northern Forest, a 26-million-acre working landscape stretching from eastern Maine through New Hampshire and Vermont and into northern New York. A central component of the program is the importance of the Northern Forest to society and the need for research activities to have relevance and benefit to the people who live within its boundaries, work with its resources, use its products, visit it and care about it.