PADDLING THROUGH MONET’S GARDEN: Kelsey Kane-Ritsch, recipient of a fellowship that has landed her at Princeton’s D&R Greenway, will use her experiences working at the famous garden at Giverny and other far-flung locations to encourage stewardship of the environment during the one-year program.

Kelsey Kane-Ritsch has worked on environmental issues in different corners of the globe. She helped develop a curriculum on biodiversity in Kenya, worked with tribal elders and conservation groups in New Caledonia, and focused on invasive species management at Monet’s Garden at Giverny, France — all during her four years at Princeton University, from which she graduated in May having majored in anthropology with minors in environmental studies and French.

Ms. Kane-Ritsch is back in Princeton this year as an intern for the D&R Greenway Land Trust. As the Charles Evans Future Conservation Leader, she is the recipient of a fellowship that charges her with raising awareness of stewardship of lands and waterways. Specifically, she is working on two new apps for the Abbott Marshlands near Trenton and planning River Days, a series of events linking a network of 23 nature centers in the Delaware River watershed.

“These are exciting projects,” she said during a telephone conversation last week. “The main thing is River Days, where we’re putting together events through the end of October, all trying to highlight the importance of the watershed and the stewardship actions people can take.”

D&R Greenway partnered with Mercer County to establish the Tulpehaking Nature Center, which is where Ms. Kane-Ritsch will work on the two apps for Abbott Marshlands. She is especially enthused about creating a self-guided tour along a canoe trail. “It has to do with the connection between the D&R Greenway and the nature center, and it focuses on birds, animals, and the marsh. People can listen to stories by experts in the field as they paddle along,” she said.

Ms. Kane-Ritsch comes to the D&R Greenway through Princeton AlumniCorps’ Project 55 Fellowship Program, which matches recent graduates with nonprofit groups in six regions throughout the country. D&R Greenway was the first in New Jersey invited to participate last year. The position is a one-year, paid fellowship.

A native of Los Angeles, Ms. Kane-Ritsch was a pre-professional ballet dancer at the San Francisco Ballet School and Pasadena Dance Theater before coming to Princeton. While environmental research became her focus at college, she maintained her dance training, joining Princeton University Ballet and becoming its artistic director during her senior year. She also danced with the University’s Body Hype troupe and still takes classes at Princeton Ballet School.

But environmental issues are her focus for the future. “This fellowship gives me the opportunity to get some good work experience in the nonprofit field,” she said. “I definitely want to keep working in the environmental field, but I’m not sure yet of the path I’m going to take.”

It was after her freshman year that Ms. Kane-Ritsch traveled to Kenya through the Princeton Environmental Institute to help develop a curriculum and teach in after-school programs of 10 elementary and high schools. “It was an incredible experience and taught me about environmental conservation,” she said. “I would say one of the things that hit me the most and caused me to major in anthropology was seeing how local people interacted with their environment. It really drove home the fact that it is always a learning experience, and really important to not just look at the scientific parts, but at the culture as well. I followed that through my Princeton career.”

Ms. Kane-Ritsch’s summer internship at Monet’s Garden at Giverny came via the University’s Princeton in France program. “I got so lucky with summer internships,” she said. “They send a certain number of students to language immersion internships, and I told them I was interested in the environment. So they sent me there. What a great intersection of my love of the arts and the environment. Also, it was really fun. I worked as a gardener, and even got called on sometimes to direct people and tell them a little bit about Monet.”

The New Caledonia experience came just before Ms. Kane-Ritsch’s senior year, and was the topic of her thesis.

“My parents thought I was insane,” she said with a laugh. “But it was incredible. I applied for research funding from Princeton and set up an internship for myself. I chose that because I was doing research into areas with environmental and cultural interaction. The tribes in the northern part of the island had a very close line between the two. I worked with a local environmental group run by these tribes, looking at how to combine their traditional knowledge with western knowledge. I also got to work with teachers in the schools to try to get some more programs with the elders because that was something being lost with the modernization of the area.”

Ms. Kane-Ritsch said she was amazed to find out that 20,000 acres in central New Jersey have been preserved. “I’m really looking forward to these projects I’ll be working on,” she said. “And it’s nice to be spending time back here in Princeton.”

Of the partnership with D&R Greenway, AlumniCorps executive director Andrew Nurkin said in a statement, “We are thrilled to match a thoughtful, energetic student with D&R Greenway Land Trust, which has a wonderful record of preserving and caring for land right here in our back yard. This kind of connection is what AlumniCorps is all about.”