Max Olsen

Landscape Assistant

Max and his family originally hail from the ridges and valleys of Pennsylvania but are recent transplants to southern Maine, where they have been reveling in the accessibility to the Green, White, and Blue Mountains as well as Maine’s stunning coastline. Prior to joining the ATC as the Landscape Program Assistant, Max was the volunteer coordinator for the Southern Maine Volunteer Beach Profile Monitoring Program. In that role, he coordinated over 100 volunteers, assuring timely and accurate data collection for the community science initiative.

He is currently a graduate student in Penn State’s Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Management and Human Dimensions of Natural Resources and the Environment PhD programs. His research aims to understand the links between human behavior, memory, and landscape features to provide actionable strategies for parks and protected area managers to enhance the visitor experience.

His work and academic experiences have provided him a wide range of opportunities to connect people and communities to the parks, protected areas, and the wild places closest to them. He looks forward to continuing this work by helping to strengthen, expand, and diversify the network of organizational and agency ties that enable NATLP to effectively work toward its critical mission of landscape scale protection and conservation from the Hudson River to Katahdin.