Board and Staff
Staff of the Wild Utah Project
| Jim Catlin, project coordinator and native Utahn, has been active in public land issues for more than 25 years. His PhD from the University of California at Berkeley focused on GIS and land use planning. His M.S. in regional land use planning at the University of Utah analyzed Wasatch Front air quality. In 1996 under the guidance of The Wildlands Project, Jim founded the Wild Utah Project to support the work of other Utah conservation activists. In addition to overseeing data collection and analysis necessary for reserve design projects in Utah, Jim provides GIS support and scientific analysis for Utah environmental organizations. His awards include the John Muir Award, the Sierra Club's highest conservation award, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance Conservation Award. Jim served recently for six years on the board of directors of the Sierra Club. | |
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Allison Jones received her B.A in Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz under the guidance of her mentor and advisor, Michael Soule. She then completed her M.S in Conservation Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno in 1996. Her Masters study analyzed the effects of cattle grazing on small mammal communities in the Great Basin. She then worked as an ecological consultant in both Colorado and Utah as an endangered species specialist, where she performed habitat assessments and surveys for federally threatened birds, small mammals and plants. As staff conservation biologist for The Wild Utah Project, Allison collects and assembles biological data to be used in reserve design for Utah. Allison also provides biological analyses for Utah conservation groups that do not typically have these services in-house. Examples include detailed conservation biology analyses of proposed federal land management agency plans and actions. Allison has also been appointed by the Director of Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to sit on two state task forces: one to rewrite Utah's black bear management plan, and another, currently underway, to write Utah's first wolf conservation and management plan. Click here to download Allison's Curriculum Vitae. |
| Wendy Bates has been working as a GIS Analyst for the Wild Utah Project since June 2003. After earning a B.S. in Geography with a GIS emphasis from the University of Utah in 2002, she was employed collecting GIS field data and later as a Quality Assurance supervisor for Pacificorp. This entailed use of a GPS unit in conjunction with a variety of field data collection equipment and methods, a number of which she is now helping employ to the benefit of the conservation community. Since joining the Wild Utah Project, Wendy has been working on GIS analyses and mapping projects associated with a multitude of public land issues including land use plan revisions, off-road vehicle use, roadless inventories and wilderness proposals. She most recently completed WUP's lynx least-cost path analysis, a habitat suitability and connectivity model identifying priority lands for conservation of habitat in an effort to restore lynx connectivity between southern Colorado and the greater Yellowstone region. She also assists with WUP's day-to-day IT issues and technology upgrades. | |
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Amy O'Connor joined the Wild Utah Project in April 2009. Amy came to the nonprofit world with bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from the University of Utah. For eight years (1988-1996), she served as Membership Director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. During this time, the membership grew from 1,000 to over 20,000, while Amy worked on membership recruitment, retention and upgrade. For six years of her tenure at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Amy was the publisher and managing editor of the organization's newsletter and other outreach materials. In 1997, Amy began full time work for Integrated Development Consulting, Inc., which she established and where she built the financial and organizational stability of nonprofits through training, facilitation and coaching. Her areas of expertise include comprehensive development planning, strategic planning, donor stewardship, board development, membership recruitment and cultivation, and communication. |
Board of Directors of the Wild Utah Project
Jeff Kessler is a long time conservation activist, working as paid staff, board member, and volunteer for organizations protecting wildlife and wild places in Wyoming, Colorado, South Dakota and Utah. Jeff is co-founder and was for many years Executive Director of Biodiversity Conservation Alliance (Laramie, WY). Jeff was a board member of the Wyoming Outdoor Council (Lander, WY) for ten years and the Center for Native Ecosystems (Denver, CO) for four years. He also was a steering committee member of the Southern Rockies Conservation Alliance for many years. Jeff's conservation interests include the application of conservation science and GIS to federal land and wildlife management, protection of imperiled native species, and the protection of natural areas. After nearly 25 years in Wyoming, Jeff now resides in Salt Lake City, UT where he is employed by the University of Utah as a mechanical engineer.
William Newmark is a research curator and conservation biologist in the Utah Museum of Natural History. He holds a B.A. in biology from the University of Colorado, a M.S. in wildland management from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Michigan. His research is focused on patterns of extinction of vertebrate species, protected area and wildlife corridor design, vertebrate species movement, and conservation and development. He has been conducting field research for over twenty years in western North America and East Africa. His findings on patterns of extinction of large mammals in western North American and Tanzanian parks and birds on tropical forest fragments have highlighted the problems that nature reserves face in conserving biological diversity and have provided an important justification for a series of worldwide initiatives to link national parks and related reserves with wildlife corridors. He also serves as an international consultant in conservation biology to a number of bilateral and multilateral donor organizations and has been a planner and a technical adviser on a number of conservation projects in East Africa.
Stephen Trimble was born in Denver, his family's base for roaming the West with his geologist father. After a liberal arts education at Colorado College, he worked as a park ranger in Colorado and Utah, earned a master's degree in ecology at the University of Arizona, served as director of the Museum of Northern Arizona Press, and for five years lived in Indian Country near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has been a full-time free-lance writer and photographer since 1981. Trimble has received significant awards for his photography, his non-fiction, and his fiction-and the breadth of those awards mirrors the wide embrace of his work: The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation; The National Cowboy Museum's Western Heritage Award; and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College, honoring his efforts to increase our understanding of Western landscapes and peoples and his choice to remain a stubborn generalist. Trimble has published twenty books, almost all focused on western wildlands and natural history. One of those books Trimble co-compiled with Terry Tempest Williams, which was a landmark effort by writers hoping to sway public policy: Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness. Trimble makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah, with his wife and two children.
Left to right, WUP Board members Jim Catlin, Steve Trimble, Bill Newmark and Jeff Kessler
