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Senior Program Manager, Americas
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Alexa Montefiore
Senior Program Manager, Americas
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Alexa Montefiore is the Senior Program Manager for the Americas. She works directly with the Rocky Mountain and Mesoamerica and Caribbean Programs. In this role, she supports strategic planning, partnership development, grants management, civic engagement, communications, facilitating work flow between field programs and NY, and serving as the regional lead for SMART projects. Alexa Montefiore initially joined WCS in 2013 as the Program Manager for the SMART Partnership, which is comprised of WCS, CITES MIKE, NCZ, GWC, FZS, Panthera, Peace Parks Foundation, WWF and ZSL. Prior to joining WCS, Alexa worked at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, focusing on a range of initiatives for social good, with the ultimate goal of helping people live happier, healthier, and safer lives. Alexa has experience with communications and marketing, specifically as it relates to executing traditional and social media relations, content development for a range of print and online materials, strategic planning, and managing and coordinating large teams. Alexa hopes to continue her quest to better society by cultivating innovative programs that make people think and act differently. Alexa also has a Master's Degree from NYU in Environmental Conservation.
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Landscape and Spatial Ecologist
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Brent Brock
Landscape and Spatial Ecologist
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Brent received a Bachelor of Science degree in wildlife biology in 1985 and a Master of Science degree in rangeland ecology in 1997 at Kansas State University. He works as the Northern Rockies Landscape and Spatial Analytics Leads for the Rocky Mountains Program. He has 30+ years' experience focused on applying GIS and spatial analysis in the fields of ecology and conservation science. His work has focused on everything from cockroaches and cicadas to bison and grizzly bears. For the past decade, much of his focus has been on large landscape wildlife connectivity and developing advanced tools to improve land use planning to minimize the impact of rural sprawl on wildlife. He is dedicated to protecting and restoring one of the most biologically intact ecosystems in North America. His current focus is on developing innovative solutions for preserving working lands and improving stewardship for wildlife they contain in the face of increasing threats from rapidly growing human population in the region.
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Director US Field Conservation Programs
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Cristina Mormorunni
Director US Field Conservation Programs
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Most recently, Cristina Mormorunni served has founder and principal of TERRAMAR Consulting Group, which designs and evaluates conservation strategies. She has worked in the conservation arena for +25 years leading international and national conservation programs and developing strategies for non-profits, foundations, and individual donors. She is now the Director of US Field Conservation Programs, and also serves as Regional Director for the Rocky MountainProgram. She received her academic training in Psychology at Connecticut College and University of Washington's Graduate School of Marine Affairs, focusing her master’s research on indigenous marine co-management models and community-based systems for conservation in the North Pacific. She most recently completed a MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the Institute for American Indian Art.
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Cynthia Hartway
Conservation Scientist
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Cynthia Hartway received her Ph.D in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004. Her specialties are population modeling and quantitative methods in conservation biology. She currently works as a bison project scientist for the Americas program.
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Senior Conservation Ecologist
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Eric W. Sanderson
Senior Conservation Ecologist
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Eric W. Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Scientist for the WCS Global Conservation Program. Sanderson received his Ph.D. in ecology (emphasis in ecosystem and landscape ecology) from the University of California, Davis, in 1998. His research interests include the application of landscape ecology to conservation problems, including geospatial techniques, and the historical and geographical context of conservation from site-based efforts to global conservation planning. As the Associate Director of the Living Landscapes Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, Eric was one of the principal architects of the landscape species approach to conservation, range-wide priority-setting (a planning method for saving species across their historical ranges), and the human footprint. He has contributed to species planning efforts for lions, tigers, bears, jaguars, snow leopards, tapirs, peccaries, American crocodiles, North American bison and Mongolian gazelle; and landscape planning conservation efforts in Argentina, Tanzania, Mongolia, and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Adirondack Park in the USA, among others. He is also the leader of the Mannahatta Project, an effort to understand the historical ecology of New York City.
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Joel Berger
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Dr. Berger directs a number of projects for WCS; among these are the pronghorn migration corridor conservation project and the impact of energy development on wildlife projects in Greater Yellowstone, the impacts of climate change on musk ox in the Alaskan Arctic and the saiga antelope conservation project in Mongolia. Joel received his doctoral degree in biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and subsequently worked for the Smithsonian Institution for 7 years before becoming a tenured full professor at the University of Nevada, Reno (16 years). His current research focuses on the conservation of species and intact ecosystems. He has written 4 books on wild horses, rhinos, bison, and fear in prey species. Joel is also the John J. Craighead Chair in Wildlife Biology at the U of Montana.
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Connectivity Initiative Coordinator
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Jon Beckmann
Connectivity Initiative Coordinator
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As a Conservation Scientist at WCS, Jon is the Connectivity Initiative Coordinator for the North America Program. As Principle Investigator or Co-PI on several projects in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the Sierra-Nevada, Great Basin, and other regions of North America, Jon’s current research and conservation portfolio includes: 1) examining impacts of natural gas development on pronghorn; 2) protecting ungulate (pronghorn, moose and elk) migrations by understanding and reducing impacts of wildlife-vehicle collisions and rural residential sprawl in migration corridors; 3) investigating and reducing human-bear conflicts along the wildland-urban interface; 4) using resource selection modeling, Brownian Bridge models, and circuit theory modeling to examine connectivity for large carnivores and ungulates; 5) examining impacts of the border fence along the US-Mexico border on wildlife connectivity (jaguars and other species); and 6) understanding how human-altered environments impact cougar ecology, behavior and population dynamics. Along with >40 publications, Jon is lead editor on a book titled Safe Passages: Highways, Wildlife and Habitat Connectivity. Jon has given over 60 scientific meeting presentations and over 40 invited university and professional training presentations. His research has been the subject of more than 100 radio, television, and newspaper features including NBC Nightly News, Discovery Channel, NY Times, LA Times, Newsweek, National Geographic, and The Wall Street Journal. Jon applies science to affect conservation through the public policy arena; for example, his collaborative field research motivated the $9.7M construction of under- and overpasses on a Wyoming highway to provide the Path of the Pronghorn migration safe passage across the road, and his published research and outreach on human-bear conflicts prompted new bear-resistant dumpster laws and ordinances in several counties in California and Nevada.
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Kelsey Pazera
Program Associate
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Kelsey Pazera is the Program Associate for the Rocky Mountain Region. Through this role she supports strategic partnerships and engagement, elevating science to inspire action and awareness, and supports civic engagement and strategic planning. Before her role at WCS she completed her bachelors in Sociology and Sustainable Development at UCCS where her passion for linking social behavior with preserving and promoting diversity in the natural environment began. Due to her hands on experience throughout the Rockies in various communities, conserving wildlife and wild places and building resilient communities with sustainable food systems has become her life passions.
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GIS Analyst and Developer
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Kim Fisher
GIS Analyst and Developer
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Kim Fisher works in Conservation Support as a GIS analyst and developer, assisting WCS staff with a broad range of spatial analyses. Most recently, Kim has focused on disturbance modeling, ecological network visualization, and web application development for the Mannahatta and Welikia Projects (http://welikia.org), as well as on analysis scripts and web application development for a project analyzing and visualizing the effects of over-the-horizon consumption (http://over-the-horizon-consumption.org/index.php). He joined WCS in 2007, after seven years as a principal of the web development firm Square Water. Kim studied anthropology at Reed College and, although he now grudgingly admits to being a New York native, he spent several childhood years in Nepal and continues to leap at every opportunity to travel, hike and climb.
- Spatial Analysis
- GIS Programming
- Web-Based Applications
- Species Range-Wide Priority Setting
- Landscape Species Approach
- Conceptual Modeling
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Latrice Tatsey
Research Fellow
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Latrice Tatsey serves as Research Fellow at WCS.
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