Land, water, science, and policy.
Twenty-five years in land and habitat management, water planning and infrastructure, large-scale adaptive management, and program leadership. Most of that work supported the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program as it grew from a novel implementation framework into an endangered species recovery success story.
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Independent Executive Director of the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program since 2018. The Program is a congressionally authorized, multi-state endangered species recovery program governed through a collaborative partnership among Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, the U.S. Department of the Interior, water users, and environmental organizations. Provide neutral executive leadership across parties with diverse legal, regulatory, water-management, and conservation interests. Joined the Program at the time of authorization as Director of Habitat Management and Rehabilitation and helped build it from a negotiated agreement into a nationally significant endangered species recovery effort.
As the Program prepares to enter its next phase, exploring future work at the intersection of land, water, science and public policy.
Bachelor of Science, Comprehensive Biology, summa cum laude. Chadron State College, 2000.
Lead or co-author of more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific publications.
Program and corporate leadership & strategic transition
Moving complex program from negotiated agreement to a mature operation. This includes building out policies and procedures, budgeting, staffing, finance, contracting, land and water acquisition, and program management.
Multi-stakeholder governance
Working within consensus-based committees of state and federal agencies, water users, and environmental organizations. Implementing and operationalizing learning in situations of high uncertainty and conflicting values.
Adaptive management implementation
Design, implementation, and cross-disciplinary integration of large-scale habitat and species response experiments — combining hydrology, geomorphology, and species ecology — in natural systems with high variability and little to no experimental control.
Science–policy integration
Communicating and applying scientific learning — alongside the values of parties with competing legal, regulatory, and conservation interests — to successfully navigate the science-policy nexus, one of the most common failure points of adaptive management.
Programs operate on trust
The Platte River Recovery Implementation Program was negotiated and implemented in a climate of high uncertainty and disagreement. Independence was built into the program so that no single stakeholder could control outcomes. Even so, nearly everyone involved assumed the program would fail.
In that environment, the first job is building trust: listening and learning closely enough to understand each stakeholder's values, speak their language, and hear what they are actually telling you. The second job is protecting the program's integrity, which is where independence is vital. On a system as constrained as the Platte, no decision makes everyone happy. Independence means being willing to be the buffer, helping craft policy options that often leave everyone slightly unhappy but still confident they were treated fairly.
No single experiment is enough
Large-scale adaptive management happens in natural systems with high variability, little or no experimental control, and few opportunities for replication. Those conditions are almost the opposite of the ones in which science performs best, so a single management experiment rarely yields results strong enough to withstand criticism.
That is why the more durable answer is not one better experiment, but several independent lines of evidence aimed at the same question:
- management experiments
- simulation modeling
- retrospective analysis
- comparisons with other river systems
Each line of evidence has its own limitations. But when they point to the same conclusion, the science becomes far harder to dismiss, especially in programs where stakeholders already disagree about what should happen.
Science rarely settles a value disagreement
Adaptive management is the framework most recovery programs adopt, and part of its appeal is an implicit promise: science will sort it out. Run the experiments, and the right management choice will become obvious. It is an attractive idea because it lets a program keep moving despite unresolved conflict. Science can compel a decision only when stakeholders already share values and uncertainty is low. Recovery programs are the opposite: uncertainty is high, and values genuinely conflict. In that setting, science does not resolve the disagreement. The conflict simply goes underground and returns as an argument about whether the science is reliable enough to act on. The program commissions more studies, the science pile grows, and still none of it feels sufficient to move anyone off position. We came to call that being anchored at adjust: stuck at the last step of the loop.
What breaks the anchor is not more science, but a different role for science. Its job is not to pick the winner. Its job is to show decision-makers the full range of choices the evidence can support, and what each choice would cost or achieve. That puts the values question where it belongs: out in the open, with the people accountable for the decision, weighed alongside the science.
Happy to talk.
I'd welcome conversations with organizations working across natural resource and conservation challenges. I bring particular depth in implementation and operations: adaptive management, land and water strategy, species recovery, collaborative conservation, and program leadership.