Karen Beattie

Karen Beattie is the Director of Science and Stewardship for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, a private non-profit land trust that owns 9,006 acres on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Karen grew up on Long Island, New York. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and spent five years post-undergrad doing seasonal internships for varied ornithological research projects. She obtained her Master’s of Science degree in Wildlife Management from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where her Master’s research focused on the ecology, habitat use patterns, and management needs of Short-eared Owls (Asio flammeus) and Northern Harriers (Circus cyanneus) on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. In 1992, she was hired as the Ecologist for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, where she now oversees the Department of Science and Stewardship. Her research and management work currently focuses on restoration and maintenance of early successional habitats, fire ecology and wildland fire management planning, property conservation management planning, nesting shorebird management and protection, and rare species ecology.

Sarah Bois

Dr. Sarah Bois is the Director of Research and Education for the Linda Loring Nature Foundation (LLNF) on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. As a plant ecologist, her research has focused on a myriad of conservation and biodiversity topics including non-native invasive species, native shrub phenological response to climate change, management of sandplain grasslands, and rare species conservation. In her current position, Dr. Bois manages 104 acres of conservation land which consist primarily of sandplain grasslands, coastal heathlands, and coastal shrublands. Dr. Bois is the co-Chair of the Invasive Plant Species Committee for Nantucket and an active member of the Nantucket Biodiversity Initiative, a collaboration of island conservation groups. Her position at LLNF marries her interests in research, stewardship, and education where she leverages research experiences into educational opportunities. Sarah received her PhD from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut where her research focused on invasive plant distributions in New England and efforts to prioritize species management. Her experience with grassland management started early in her career working for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation and includes a stint working in coastal wet prairie systems on the west coast of Washington and Oregon.

Russ Hopping

Russ is the Ecology Program Director for The Trustees of Reservations. He has a master’s degree in Environmental Biology from Antioch New England Graduate School and a bachelor’s degree in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic. He has worked for The Trustees since 1997, overseeing the stewardship of ecological resources at The Trustees’ more than 26,000 acres. Russ has more than 20 years of experience restoring and managing natural habitats and resources including, coastal shorebird populations on barrier beaches, fire-adapted habitats, grasslands, rare species habitat and control of invasive species.

Jennifer Karberg

Jennifer Karberg, PhD, is the Research Program Supervisor at the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, a non-profit land conservation group in Massachusetts. Jen directs, develops and manages research projects intended to assess various management techniques as well as to help create informed land conservation and management plans in salt marshes, coastal plain pondshores, and globally rare sandplain grasslands and heathlands. Jen’s primary research interests include wetland ecology, tidal marsh restoration and migration, plant conservation genetics, fire ecology and rare species ecology. Jen got her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her graduate degrees from Michigan Technological University studying the population genetics and habitat ecology of the carnivorous purple pitcher plant. Jen is currently the President of the Society of Wetland Scientists New England chapter and has been a member of SWS since her first undergraduate wetland ecology class.

Karen Lombard

Karen Lombard has been working in stewardship and restoration with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) since 1997 and has been with TNC in Massachusetts since 1999. She leads a TNC stewardship team that manages over 6000 acres of TNC fee land and monitors over 2,500 acres of conservation easement land in Massachusetts. She has over 20 years of experience in restoring and managing habitats on TNC and partner lands including floodplain forest restoration, application of prescribed fire, and invasive plant control. She also oversees the restoration and management of the several hundred acres of sandplain grassland on Martha’s Vineyard for TNC. She has an M.S. in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan and a B.A. from Williams College.

Chris Neill

Dr. Neill is an ecosystem ecologist who studies how changes to land use alter the structure and functioning of ecosystems. In the Amazon, he investigates how deforestation changes the way water and materials move from land to water and within the channels and streams and rivers and how the intensification of soybean and corn cropping alters runoff to streams and greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. Neill uses gauged catchments, natural abundance of stable isotopes and long-term vegetation plots to understand tropical ecosystem responses. In Massachusetts, where increases in residential development threaten estuaries and terrestrial ecosystems that contain high and unique biological diversity, Dr. Neill works with local conservation organizations to design improved methods of ecosystem conservation and restoration. Dr. Neill previously spent four years as Director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, MA, where was a scientist from 1996 to 2016, and where he retains an appointment as Fellow. He also directed the Brown-MBL Partnership for six years. Dr. Neill was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of São Paulo in Piracicaba, Brazil, in 2007 and a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University in 2010. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Polly Weigand

Polly Weigand holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies and Biology from St. Lawrence University in Canton NY and a Master’s of Science in Urban Ecology from Hofstra University. She is an Ecologist for the Central Pine Barrens Joint Planning and Policy in Westhampton Beach, NY and is responsible for implementing science, stewardship, and educational activities including prescribed burns, ecosystem management and monitoring, and invasive species control in order to help protect the Central Pine Barrens, a globally rare ecosystem.

Polly also serves as the Executive Director of the Long Island Native Plant Initiative (LINPI), an organization she founded during her 13-year tenure with the Suffolk County Soil and Water Conservation District. LINPI, advances wildland seed collection, banking, and plant material production in order to provide ready sources of genetically adapted and ecologically appropriate plant materials for use in commercial plant production, landscaping and restoration activities. In addition, Polly also helps oversee the administration of the Long Island Invasive Species Management Area, the local Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (PRISM) as an additional means to further help protect Long Island’s native ecosystems from the degrading effects of invasive species.

Grassland restoration has been the central focus of her educational accomplishments and professional career. For her master’s thesis, Polly conducted the first comparative floristic grassland study on Long Island “When does restoration do more harm than good? Lessons learned for grassland management in the Atlantic Coastal Pine Barren Ecoregion”, which also examined the impact of management and land use on grassland quality. She also has developed many technical reports and inventories to aid the public and agencies in countless grassland creation and restoration projects. To help ensure restoration of regional sandplain grasslands advances with the most ecologically appropriate plant materials, Polly continues to lead LINPI in conducting commercial production of seed and plant materials for a diversity of sandplain grassland species.

Robert Wernerehl

Dr. Robert Wernerehl is the State Botanist of Massachusetts where he leads the botany program at the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program (NHESP), Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. Through the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA), he helps protect and monitor populations of over 500 species of vascular plants state-listed as Endangered, Threatened, Special Concern, Watch List and Historic, including four federally-listed threatened and endangered species. Dr. Wernerehl has over 20 years of conservation experience. Previously, he served as an instructor at University of Wisconsin-Madison and has over 15 years of private consulting experience. Dr. Wernerehl earned a PhD in Plant Ecology and a Bachelor of Science in Botany from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Michael Whittemore

Michael Whittemore is the Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy on Martha’s Vineyard. He is a vegetation ecologist interested in the effects of land use on vegetation. Previously, he worked for Woods Hole Research Center where he coordinated a cranberry restoration research project and collaborated with a regional committee to develop a guidebook for managing sandplain grassland. Mr. Whittemore’s graduate research focused on classifying and mapping plant communities, evaluating floristic quality, and developing a database of vegetation composition and environmental characteristics at a state nature preserve in southeastern Ohio. He has also assisted with multiple long-term vegetation studies with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, US Forest Service, and The Ohio State University. He holds a B.S. from University of Rio Grande and an M.S. in Environmental Studies from the Voinovich School of Leadership & Public Affairs at Ohio University.