Kai Foster is a Project Manager/GIS Analyst with professional and academic experience working with diverse communities on a broad range of environmental issues. In 2008, she joined Conservation Biology Institute focusing her attention primarily on protected areas in the United States. Before joining the CBI team, Kai spent three years working with communities in Western Alaska mapping areas of cultural and ecological significance. Her interest in the relationship between people and landscapes has brought an appreciation and understanding to her current work in protected areas.     

Jerre has worked with CBI for 16 years as a conservation ecologist in endangered species research and landscape-scale conservation planning and management of natural resources in the U.S., Europe, and Mexico. She is passionate about developing and orchestrating partnerships among the academic community, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and land managers to leverage funds and information for achieving conservation goals. Throughout her career, Jerre has researched and developed priorities for conservation and funding in California and Baja California, resulting in the acquisition and management of hundreds of thousands of acres for conservation, including the 240,000-acre Tejon Ranch in the Tehachapi Mountains, Donner Summit and Martis Valley in the Sierra Nevada (>15,000 acres), >100,000 acres in San Diego County, and Bahía de San Quintín in Baja California (>5,000 acres). She is project director for the Las Californias Binational Conservation Initiative which promotes creation of a binational park along the Peninsular Ranges of California and Baja-California. She has directed conservation planning, management, and monitoring for California’s Natural Community Conservation Planning programs in southern California, developed a regional program for coordinating management and monitoring in San Diego County, and currently works with land managers and researchers to develop management and monitoring plans for these programs. She coordinated development of the population monitoring framework for the six subspecies of Island Fox on the California Channel Islands and, through a grant from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, developed a science-based regional planning framework for wind energy in the Tehachapi Mountains and southern Sierra Nevada. She serves as a science and education advisor for several land trusts. As a member of the board of Terra Peninsular, she is active in conservation in Baja California.

Dr. Comendant is a Senior Scientist with 15 years of experience in research, communication, and organizational capacity building.  Her program and project work is at the nexus of conservation science and technology.  She has a proven track record developing innovative methods, tools, databases, and science-based solutions that increase knowledge-transfer, enhance stakeholder engagement, and inform natural resource management decisions.  Skills and experience include:

Dr. Comendant received her Ph.D. from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz where she studied life history evolution.  She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology. She lives with her husband and their twins in Napa, California.

Specialties:  ecology, evolution, protected areas and easements, online data sharing, visualization, and collaboration platforms and tools, island ecology, invasive species, herpetology, social media, inbound marketing, and landscape-scale informatic assessments.

Jim Strittholt is Co-Founder, President, and Chief Science Officer of the Conservation Biology Institute and has over 26 years’ experience in applying computer mapping technologies (including GIS and remote sensing) to address various ecological assessments and conservation planning projects in the U.S. and internationally. He holds undergraduate degrees in Botany, Zoology and Secondary Education from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) where he also earned a Masters in Zoology in vertebrate population genetics. Jim earned a Ph.D. in 1994 from Ohio State University in a self-designed multi-disciplinary program emphasizing landscape ecology, conservation planning, and computer mapping technologies. While a truly multi-disciplinary degree, he conducted most his research and developed most of his technical skills from the Center for Mapping – a NASA Center of Excellence. While at Ohio State, he earned numerous academic achievement awards including being chosen as a University Presidential Fellow during his final year.

He has experience working with large mammals, field research on forests and vertebrates, and taught numerous science courses in high school for six years and several college courses in zoology and biology. Over the last 22 years, he has been principle investigator on numerous projects including nature reserve designs, conservation gap analyses, forest and watershed assessments, ecological modeling, and remote sensing applications in conservation. He has also authored numerous reports, peer-reviewed articles, and white papers. Finally, he has taught numerous workshops on conservation planning. Areas of expertise include conservation planning, landscape ecology, geographic information systems, and remote sensing.

Dr. Dennis Grossman is a Senior Scientist for the Conservation Biology Institute.

He has worked as a senior scientist for non-profit conservation organizations for the past 20 years, and is a recognized expert in conservation planning, biodiversity assessments, and ecological classification.  Dr. Grossman earned his Ph.D. in Plant Ecology from the University of Hawaii in conjunction with the East-West Center .  He was awarded M.S. and B.S. degrees in Botany from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Denny has made significant contributions in advancing our understanding of terrestrial, freshwater and coastal/marine ecosystems, and in the application of this knowledge for conservation and resource management.  He was instrumental in the development of the classification standards for vegetation, freshwater and coastal/marine ecosystems that are now regularly used for conservation planning and resource management by many U.S. and international organizations.  He has also focused on the development and use of appropriate technology to ensure the effective application of current scientific information for improved efficiency and effectiveness of ecological assessments and conservation plans.

Dr. Grossman has developed strong partnerships with scientists, public agencies and private corporations to develop and implement novel approaches to conservation and resource management challenges.   He has worked extensively with conservation projects and partners across North and South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, South Asia and Indonesia.  An author of numerous articles and reports, Dr. Grossman serves on several federal and scientific committees.

While serving for 7 years as Vice-President for Science,  Dr. Grossman helped to build NatureServe after it was created as a spin off from the Science Division of The Nature Conservancy.  During his 12 years in the position of Chief Ecologist, Dr. Grossman successfully integrated ecological concepts to prioritize conservation actions throughout The Nature Conservancy.  He currently serves as a Senior Policy Advisor for The Nature Conservancy.

Dominique was born and raised in northern France. She received her Master’s degree in 1978 in Lille (France) and her Ph.D. in 1983 at Colorado State University working on biogeochemical cycles in the shortgrass prairie. In 1984, after a brief 3 months in Thailand teaching a simulation modeling class, she went to U.C. Riverside as a postdoc simulating nitrogen fixing shrubs in the Sonoran desert then went two years later to New Mexico State University to simulate Chihuahuan desert ecosystem processes. She was hired in 1988 as a contractor for the US EPA in Corvallis (OR) to work on climate change impacts on paddy rice ecosystems in Asia. In 1994 she spent a year working in Toulouse (France) simulating Mediterranean ecosystems. In the Fall of 1995, she started working with a USFS team simulating climate change impacts on global terrestrial systems first out of the University of New Hampshire and then out of Corvallis where she also taught at Oregon State University (OSU) as faculty in the Biological and Ecological Engineering Department. In 2000, she moved to Olympia (WA), telecommuting for her work at OSU. In the fall of 2006, she spent 2 months as invited professor in Paris. She worked as director of the Climate Change Science Team for The Nature Conservancy from January 2007 until August 2008. She went back to OSU as associate professor, continuing her simulation work on climate change impacts. In June 2009, she joined the Conservation Biology Institute. In her free time, she bikes and kayaks, hikes, skis and paints watercolors.

Dave joined the climate change research group at CBI in 2010, to continue his work of modeling the effects of climate change on natural vegetation.  He had turned to that challenge in 2001 following a long career in industry.  After 5 years in the trenches as the computer guy in the U.S. Forest Service MAPSS modeling team on the Oregon State University campus, he returned to graduate school, completing a Ph.D. in Biological and Ecological Engineering in 2009.  Using the static biogeography model MAPSS and the dynamic global vegetation model MC1, he has run simulations of potential vegetation and vegetation change for a number of areas, principally in the western U.S.  He participated in the California Scenarios 2008 project for the California Energy Commission, in a study of Yosemite National Park for the National Park Service, and in several studies of areas in Oregon, Washington, Arizona, and New Mexico for the U.S. Forest Service.  His current interests include bringing vegetation models into the Envision modeling framework developed by the BEE department at OSU.

Susan Antenen is the Conservation Biology Institute’s Sierra Nevada Project Coordinator.   Susan is helping CBI coordinate its science activities in the Sierra to deliver timely and integrated information and recommendations to public lands managers.

Susan is also the Coordinator for the Southern Sierra Partnership (SSP) comprised of CBI, The Nature Conservancy, Audubon California, Sierra Business Council, and the Sequoia Riverlands Trust.   The SSP works towards a vision of healthy vibrant towns surrounded by well-managed natural lands and thriving working farms and ranches.  

Before joining the CBI in 2010, Susan worked for The Nature Conservancy for 19 years in a number of capacities.   She started the Conservancy’s Mongolia program and grassland protected area initiative.   Before that she was the Interim Director of Maui, Hawaii.   In New York, she founded and directed one of the Conservancy’s first temperate coastal/estuarine ecosystem restoration programs in US.   Susan is a graduate of Goddard College in Vermont.

Dr. Spencer is a wildlife conservation biologist with over 35 years of professional experience in biological research and conservation planning. He specializes in the practical application of science to resources management, design and management of nature reserves, and recovery of endangered species. He has conducted numerous studies on rare and sensitive mammals, with particular focus on forest carnivores (martens and fishers) and endangered rodents (Pacific pocket mouse and Stephens’ kangaroo rat). Dr. Spencer has prepared habitat conservation plans (HCPs), habitat management plans (HMPs), and natural community conservation plans (NCCPs) for numerous sensitive species in California, including the first NCCP plan ever permitted (Poway Subarea NCCP/HCP). He also uses ecological expertise to guide large-scale efforts to conserve ecological connectivity and wildlife movement (such as the South Coast Missing Linkages Project and the California Essential Habitat Connectivity Project) as well as to restore and sustain resilient forest conditions in the face of changing climate and wildfire regimes (such as the Sierra Nevada Forest Resilience Initiative). Because he combines ecological research with real-world conservation planning experience, Dr. Spencer is often asked to lead science advisory processes for regional conservation and recovery plans, such as the California Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta Conservation Plan. He currently leads large teams working to conserve the endangered distinct population of fishers in the Sierra Nevada and the endangered Stephens’ kangaroo rat in southern California.