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Services  |   Conservation Easements Land Management and Endowments Land Stewardship Project Monitoring Ecological Restoration Planning Conservation Education

Objectives  |

Conservation Values  |

Board of Directors  |   Riley Swift Patrick J. Shea, Ph.D. John H. Anderson, D.V.M. William (Bill) Clark Alexander Ferreira Robert Weygandt

Staff Patrick J. Shea, Ph.D. Barbara Rocco Kelly Velasco Natalie Summers Jill Grant Brian Williams

WHF Staff Members

WHF is fortunate to have well-qualified and experienced individuals to broaden its preservation efforts and lead it forward into the future.

Patrick J. Shea, Ph.D.

Chief Financial Officer, Executive Director

pshea@wildlifeheritage.org
After volunteering for several years on the board of directors, Dr. Shea joined the staff of WHF in early 2005. As executive director of WHF, Dr. Shea consults with clients and potential clients to prepare documents, negotiate endowments, provide assistance on permitting regulations, and secure conservation easements.

Please also see Dr. Shea's bio as WHF's Chief Financial Officer.

Barbara Rocco

Business Manager

brocco@wildlifeheritage.org
Ms. Rocco serves as WHF's business manager, maintaining project files, AR/AP, and endowment records; corresponding with clients; researching grants; and preparing grant applications. Ms. Rocco graduated from California State University, Sacramento, with a B.A. in biology, a Single-Subject California Teaching Credential in science, and undeclared minors in both chemistry and business administration. She also completed most of her coursework for an M.S. in biological conservation. Ms. Rocco worked for 20 years as business manager at California Journal political magazine and, most recently, for 8 years with Jones & Stokes as a writer and technical editor on the water resources team and 4 years as executive director of The Wildlife Society-Western Section (Section), managing all aspects of the Section's nonprofit business, including handling logistics for the annual conferences, workshops, and symposia, keeping all financial records and AR/AP, supervising staff, keeping the website up to date, preparing financial and event reports for the board of directors and members, researching grants and sponsorship funds, and working with other organizations to cosponsor their events.

Kelly Velasco

Education Program Coordinator

kvelasco@wildlifeheritage.org
Kelly Velasco serves as WHF's education program coordinator. After extensive travel and living in Mexico, Ms. Velasco graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in Spanish linguistics and a minor in business foundations. A native of northern California, Ms. Velasco returned to her home town of Davis to receive her BCLAD (bilingual) teaching credential from the University of California, Davis. She taught for 8 years at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, a Spanish-immersion school, in Davis. For 2 years, Ms. Velasco also taught ESL at night for adults at Davis Adult School. Ms. Velasco has extensive experience in curriculum development and published "A Brief Moment with the Maya", an after-school curriculum sponsored by the Woodland Public library and implemented in two Woodland schools. In addition to teaching, Ms. Velasco has translated several scientific documents from English to Spanish and has served as official translator for U.S. Government expeditions to the Sierra San Pedro Martir mountain range in Baja, Mexico.

Natalie Summers

Grants and Agreements Coordinator

nsummers@wildlifeheritage.org
Natalie Summers serves as WHF's grants and agreements coordinator. Ms. Summers graduated from Loyola Marymount University with a B.A. in liberal studies, a minor in Chicano studies, and a multiple subject credential with CLAD. After graduating, she traveled for 1 year throughout Mexico and all of Central America, where she attended several language academies and became fluent in Spanish. On returning to California, Ms. Summers taught in bilingual fourth- through eighth-grade classrooms, as well as English as a second language courses to adults. For 3 years, Ms. Summers took on a leadership position as the ESL program coordinator and assistant administrator at the Davis Adult School. While there, she helped oversee and organize an extensive adult-school program and wrote several grants that enabled the school to fund various CBET, CalWorks, and ESL courses. She helped facilitate the implementation of the ASAP computer program required by the state for data collection.

Jill Grant

Wildlife Biologist

jgrant@wildlifeheritage.org
Jill Grant graduated from California State University, Hayward, with a B.S. in biology, a Single-Subject California Teaching Credential in science, and a minor in chemistry. Ms. Grant taught science, math, and multimedia in Contra Costa County for 7 years, incorporating creek studies and native gardening into the curriculum. She was also a working wildlife biologist before, during, and after her teaching career, conducting surveys for endangered and threatened species throughout the Bay Area. One of Ms. Grant's first jobs, under the supervision of Dr. Sam McGinnis, was to trap the elusive San Francisco garter snake for removal during the BART extension to the San Francisco airport. Later, she worked for Ibis Environmental, Inc., surveying, trapping, and collecting data on California tiger salamanders located in the foothills between Concord and Antioch, CA. Ms. Grant's passion for wildlife was set aside with the birth of her daughter in 2004. During her time at home, she took over as office manager for her husband's general contracting business, later becoming project manager. Free time was spent volunteering as newsletter editor, secretary (2006), and treasurer (2007) for Wildlife Rehabilitation & Release. She ran special events for the nonprofit, managed educational booths and was a member of the land acquisition committee. Ms. Grant lives in Newcastle.

Brian Williams

Monitoring Biologist, Williams Wildland Consulting, Inc.

bwilliams@williamswildland.com
Brian Williams is a wildlife and conservation ecologist with degrees in biology (B.S. 1991, Saint Mary's College) and biological conservation (M.S. 1998, CSU Sacramento; Thesis: Distribution, Habitat Associations, and Conservation of Purple Martins Breeding in California). He has worked as a consulting ecologist since 1990 and as an Adjunct Professor of Biology at Sierra College since 1995. Brian specializes in field surveys and research and is most widely known for his expertise with birds, a growing expertise with herpetofauna, and a solid command of the flora. His extensive field experience and research interests have given him an expert knowledge of distribution, habitat associations, behavior, and population trends of western birds, particularly in northern California where he is a lifelong resident. Brain is the northern California coordinator of the Breeding Bird Survey, former compiler of two Christmas Bird Counts, author of the first distributional bird checklists for Placer and Nevada Counties, and multiple papers including recent research on the landscape-scale effects of urbanization on bird use of oak woodlands. Nesting raptor surveys constitute his most frequent form of field work and he has monitored nests of 15 species including bald eagle, Swainson's hawk, peregrine falcon, and burrowing and long-eared owls. He has researched the effects of human disturbance on wintering grassland raptors for the California Department of Fish and Game, testified at a Board of Supervisors meeting regarding the local nesting status of Swainson's hawks, and passively relocated burrowing owls. Brian also has studied or surveyed for migratory birds ranging from herons to waterfowl, black rails to mountain plovers, and bank swallows to tricolored blackbirds. His field work with mammals has included spotlight, track, and den surveys for San Joaquin kit fox, research on Mojave ground squirrels, and baited camera station surveys for carnivores. His work with herpetofauna has included recent research on the population-level effect of manipulated flows on foothill yellow-legged frogs, training with capture methods for giant garter snakes, community sampling in the American River canyon, new records of spadefoot toads in the Sacramento Valley, and the discovery of the first red-legged frogs in Nevada County, where he prepared a no-take THP for review by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS). Brian has seined, trapped, and electrofished for salmonids and worked on fish and associated macroinvertebrate density studies in several northern California watersheds including the Yuba, American, and Mokelumne River systems. Brian has good command of the local flora and has conducted rare plant surveys and project analyses ranging from Central Valley vernal pool specialists to Sierra Nevada serpentine endemics. His experience-based knowledge of the region's ecosystems has also given him insights that can be useful for land management and restoration. Brian has prepared many pre-project surveys and evaluations including due diligence assessments, a Section 7 Biological Assessment, a Section 10 Habitat Conservation Plan, and many post-approval mitigation and monitoring reports.

Brian's current research projects include papers on the status and distribution of special-status birds in west Placer County (Williams and Pandolfino, in prep.), the birds of the Snow Mountain Region (Williams and Woodward, in prep.), and The Birds of Colusa County; authoritative distributional works on the herpetofauna of four different northern California counties (Placer, Nevada, Yuba, Colusa), and the Sacramento Valley distribution and ecology of spadefoot toads. He has recently received giant garter snake training from Glenn Wylie's lab and his USFWS recovery permit was submitted in January and is being processed.