Learning conservation from the ground up

I spent fifteen years with the Maryland Natural Heritage Program as Eastern Region Ecologist, followed by five years with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program as Mountains Ecologist and Botanist. Those two decades within the Natural Heritage Network shaped how I understand biodiversity conservation. Fieldwork teaches you that conservation is ultimately specific: a species, a population, a place, a threat, and a decision about what to do next.

It also teaches humility. Even in well-studied landscapes there are plants still waiting to be documented, populations that have not been seen in decades, and losses that can occur before science has fully understood what was there.

A change in scale

In 2021, I accepted the position of Chief Botanist at NatureServe. It was a significant departure from the work that had defined my career. I would spend less time conducting field inventories myself and more time thinking about how a continental network of scientists, shared biodiversity data, conservation assessments, and technology could help thousands of individual observations inform larger decisions.

The question was no longer only how to understand a rare plant. It was how to build systems capable of acting on what we know.

Science, data, and networks

NatureServe offered a different vantage point on conservation. The organization and its network bring together biodiversity expertise across North America and use science, data, and technology to inform conservation and stewardship. For a botanist accustomed to working population by population, the opportunity was to connect detailed biological knowledge with systems that could influence decisions across states, regions, and institutions.

What I carried forward

Moving into conservation leadership did not replace the lessons of field botany. It made them more important. Good systems still depend on good observations. National priorities still have to result in action somewhere on the ground. Data matter because they represent living populations in real places.

That transition changed the scale at which I thought about my work. I became increasingly interested not only in discovering and documenting rare plants, but in the institutions, partnerships, information, and capacity required to keep them from disappearing.