Staff
Staff | Research Associates
Craig van der Heiden, Ph.D., CEO
As Chief Executive Officer, Craig is responsible for implementing IRC’s strategies and managing overall operations. He leads IRC by deepening and extending collaborations through networking among government, scientific, non-profit and private land-owner partners, and fostering public awareness of IRC’s programs. He is also directly responsible for two core programmatic areas: Applied Conservation Science and Ecological Restoration & Management. He leads the design and implementation of cutting-edge scientific research and ecological restoration projects on the ground.
Originally from Zimbabwe in southern Africa, Craig left behind a successful career in ecotourism and entered graduate school at Florida Atlantic University. In 2005, he completed his Masters degree, which focused on modeling the habitat requirements of reintroduced black rhino in the woodland savannas of Malawi. In 2012, he received his Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from FAU for work on the distribution dynamics of crayfish populations in the Florida Everglades. A versatile and experienced manager of multifaceted projects, Craig brought knowledge of business management and complex logistics as well as the science of conservation biology when he joined as Assistant Director in 2012. In 2013, he was promoted to the role of CEO.
Resume
craig@regionalconservation.org
(561) 573-6302
Cara Abbott, MSc, Education & Outreach Coordinator / Administrative Assistant
Cara joined IRC in the summer of 2015 as the new Education and Outreach Coordinator and also serves as Administrative Assistant. She is responsible for organizing and implementing volunteer events, providing educational talks and programs, overseeing IRC social media and assisting with administrative duties. A native of northern Virginia, Cara graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Biology with Teacher Licensure in 2012. As an undergraduate, she worked as a research assistant for an ongoing study on the federally threatened Peaks of Otter Salamander (Plethodon hubrichti). Cara then moved to South Florida where she earned a Master's Degree in Environmental Science from Florida Atlantic University in the summer of 2015. Her thesis research focused on the effects of sea level rise on the Black needle rush (Juncus roemerianus) grown in a high nutrient environment. Cara also teaches biology courses for a Broward County homeschool enrichment program and volunteers with the Sea Turtle Conservation League of Singer Island.
abbott@regionalconservation.org
(305) 304-6610
George D. Gann, Chief Conservation Strategist
A founder of IRC, George is responsible for IRC's core Regional Conservation Models program, and contributes to national and international outreach on behalf of IRC. George has spent the last 40 years working on the conservation of rare plants, the restoration of ecosystems and a host of other conservation and sustainability issues. He has played a leadership role in a number of organizations including IRC, the Society for Ecological Restoration, the Florida Native Plant Society and the Tropical Audubon Society, and has received a number of awards for his conservation work. Originally from South Florida, he attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where he received a B.A. with distinction in International Affairs and Environmental Conservation. He has traveled widely in Latin America, as well as Europe, Asia and Australia.
Resume
Select Publications & Reports
Select Presentations
gann@regionalconservation.org
Michael J. Barry, Senior Biologist
A native of southwestern Michigan, Mike is responsible for much of IRC’s current work in southwestern Florida, including vegetation monitoring at Picayune Stand State Forest and sea level rise mapping. Mike has broad experience as a well-rounded biologist. After receiving a B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1990, he moved to Florida and began working as a research assistant for the University of Florida. He continued work with UF at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences’ research center in Immokalee as a part of a citrus-wildlife study. Later he worked for area environmental consulting firms, and at Panther Island Mitigation Bank, Picayune Strand State Forest, and Florida Panther & Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuges. He has managed many inventory, monitoring, prescribed fire, exotic control and ecological restoration projects. In addition, Mike has participated in several research and conservation projects in Central and South America, including research in Ecuador and Panama on poison dart frog (Dendrobates spp.) behavior and work in Costa Rica with conservation-minded residents of the Kekoldi Indigenous Reserve. Mike joined IRC in 2007 to assist with program development in southwestern Florida and Central America.
Resume
barry@regionalconservation.org
J. Carlos Trejo Torres, Ph.D., Senior Botanist
A native of the Mexican Yucatan, Carlos is responsible for IRC’s program in the Yucatan and also plays a primary role in our work in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean. His expertise is in biogeography, plant taxonomy, the study of vegetation types, and the regional history of botanical science. He has a focus on rare, endemic, and poorly known plant species. He is also deeply interested in disseminating botanical knowledge to the public, and the use of native plants in gardening and landscaping. His research and findings have been featured in newspapers, on radio, and in TV programs in Puerto Rico, the Yucatan, and the Canary Islands. Carlos has three degrees in biology - an undergraduate degree from Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán (1993), a Master's degree from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (2002), and a Doctorate from the Centro de Investigación Científica de Yucatán (2013).
Sandy Koi, MSc, Entomologist
Sandy is IRC’s resident Entomologist, whom we share with other like-minded organizations in South Florida. She earned an MSc in Entomology from the University of Florida and has a BSc in Environmental Science and Biology from Nova Southeastern University. Her scientific publications revolve around the object of her thesis, the Atala butterfly (Eumaeus atala), an imperiled South Florida species that she has been studying since 2001. Sandy currently spearheads an assisted relocation project for the Atala butterfly from eruption sites into suitable new sites in southeastern Florida. She actively coordinates butterfly surveys for organizations such as the North American Butterfly Association (NABA), Florida Natural Areas Inventory (FNAI) and IRC. She is a contributing member of the Imperiled Butterfly Working Group (IBWG), under the authority of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and a founding member of the Miami Pine Rocklands Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to protecting this globally imperiled ecosystem. Many of her photographs and plant information about South Florida butterfly host and nectar plants grace the national NABA website and she is a frequent speaker at local organizations in Florida, including Butterfly Days at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and the Southern Lepidopterists’ Society.
Maha Nusrat, Crew Leader
A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, Maha is a Crew Leader in IRC’s Ecological Restoration & Management program and is charged with carrying out invasive species control and ecological restoration projects in southeastern Florida. She was inspired from a very young age to be engaged in activities dealing with ecological studies, restoration, and environmental education. In 2011, she moved to Miami to pursue her Bachelors of Science in Biology at Florida International University. After graduating in 2013 from FIU she became involved in projects studying the pollination biology of flowering plants in the Apocynaceae family and the fragmentation of the pine rocklands on the Miami Rock Ridge. She also interned at the environmental education department at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden to help ensure that future generations develop an appreciation for and interest in their natural surroundings. She joined IRC in April 2016 and continues to fuel her passion for ecological restoration projects. In her spare time, she helps her dad with his gardens, rollerblades around town, enjoys the beach, and has fun trying new coffee shops around town.
mnusrat@regionalconservation.org
Trevor Watts, Field Biologist
A New England native, Trevor graduated from Sterling College in Northern Vermont in 2004 with a B.A. in Wildlands Ecology and Management and is currently working towards an M.S. in Fish and Wildlife Management. Throughout most of his career, Trevor has conducted research with various state, federal, and NGOs across the country from New Jersey to Alaska, California and Florida. Trevor arrived in the lower Florida Keys in the summer of 2015 and began working as a Field Biologist for IRC in the spring of 2016. He is responsible for conducting rare species surveys as well as treating exotic plant species within the Boca Chica Naval Air Base in Key West and other public lands in the lower Keys. In his spare time, he enjoys kayaking, bird watching, woodworking and traveling.
watts@regionalconservation.org
James Walther, Crew Leader
A native of Vero Beach, Florida, James graduated from University of Florida with a B.S. in Agricultural Economics in 2011. James joined IRC in the spring of 2015 and is a Crew Leader in our Ecological Restoration & Management program. In his spare time, he enjoys fishing, hiking, camping and cycling.
jwalther@regionalconservation.org
Research Associates
Steven E. Green
Steve is an ecologist with Mitigation Resources L.L.C. based in Clermont, Florida where he conducts ecological site assessments and designs, oversees and implements vegetation monitoring programs on mitigation bank sites from South Florida to the Panhandle. Steve joined IRC as a Biologist in the summer of 2005 as a part of IRC’s restoration crew for the USFWS Private Stewardship Grant Program, controlling exotic species on privately owned pine rocklands. Steve participated in, or managed a myriad of other IRC projects including long-term rare plant monitoring and surveys in Everglades National Park; status surveys of threatened, endangered and candidate plant species for the USFWS; floristic inventories for Miami-Dade County Environmentally Endangered Lands Program and Lee County Parks, and; exotic plant surveys and mapping for FNAI. Steve moved to Orlando in the fall of 2008 and assumed a new roll for IRC as a Research Associate. In this capacity, Steve has been disseminating the wealth of vascular plant knowledge he has amassed during his time at IRC and has instructed grass identification and invasive plant identification workshops for local CISMAs including the Central Florida CISMA, the Heartland CISMA and the Lake County CISMA.
Resume
sgreen@mitigationresources.com
Kirsten N. Hines, MSc
Kirsten Hines is a writer, photographer and environmental educator. With a master’s degree in biology, she has studied tropical frogs, South Florida plants and animals, and Bahamian iguanas, and is a member of the IUCN Iguana Specialist Group. Kirsten currently is a Research Associate at IRC and is coauthor of our Natives for Your Neighborhood, the online plant conservation resource. Her award-winning photography has appeared in numerous publications, websites, and brochures and is featured in the Birds of Fairchild, and Attracting Birds to South Florida Gardens, which she co-authored. She also is coauthor of Images of America: Key Biscayne. Through her writing and photography, she aims to expose the intricacies of the natural world, to lure readers and viewers into the lives of plants and animals. She attributes her interest in South Florida’s native plants and the re-greening of the urban corridor (both championed in her Attracting Birds to South Florida Gardens book) to her experiences at IRC. More of her work can be seen at www.KirstenNatureTravel.com.
James Johnson, MSc
Growing up on one of Georgia’s oldest farms, James developed a deep appreciation and a never-ending curiosity for the natural world. His Grandfather and Father impressed upon him the practice of good stewardship of the land and the conservation of its natural resources, and this wisdom guided him into his current field of work in environmental conservation.
James graduated with honors from Armstrong Atlantic State University (AASU) in Savannah, Georgia with a degree in biology. While at AASU he worked as a biological research assistant on a project aimed at better understanding the metabolic pathways of epiphytic Bromeliads. James then came to South Florida in 2009 to pursue the life of a graduate student at Florida Atlantic University and found himself at home in the environment of the Everglades and the costal landscape.
While at FAU, James was involved in many research endeavors spanning from the peat bogs in northern Alberta, Canada, to the tree islands of the Everglades. He graduated with a master’s degree in 2012 after completing a thesis titled “Estimating the Vulnerability of Everglades Peat to Combustion”. During his time in graduate school, James became became very familiar with the Greater Everglades ecosystem and joined the team at ICR in November 2012 as a field biologist to continue the ongoing conservation efforts in South Florida and beyond. In 2014 James moved back to Georgia to begin a Ph.D. program.
johnson@regionalconservation.org
Jimmy Lange, MSc
Originally from Michigan, Jimmy graduated with honors from the University of Florida with a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Science. He began his research career studying under the guidance of graduate mentor Jenny Schafer in the Mack Ecosystem Ecology Lab. He went on to join the Plant Ecology Lab at Archbold Biological Station where he assisted on a number of research projects including demography of several rare plant populations, effects of fire frequency on scrub habitat, experimental restoration of scrub habitat on reclaimed pasture, and plant community structure and composition of differing scrub management regimes. He then began work at the Michigan Tech Research Institute. There he conducted ground-truthing surveys of Great Lakes wetland plant communities and worked to generate a map of both the current and possible future extent under modeled hydrologic scenarios of Phragmites australis. Jimmy completed a Master’s degree at Florida Atlantic University where he studied combined legacy impacts of invasive species Melaleuca quinquenervia and management practices on plant communities in the northern Everglades. Jimmy joined IRC in 2014 as a field biologist then as a research associate. He is a dedicated south Florida naturalist with years of experience and a passion for botany who has worked in a number of ecosystems and will, if pressed, also throw down on a piano.
jlange@regionalconservation.org
Sarah Martin
Hailing from the wilds of New Jersey, Sarah received her degree in Environmental Studies and French from Seattle University in 2005. She has also interned and studied at The University of Pennsylvania’s Morris Arboretum, studied and worked in Belize and France, worked as a deck hand and environmental educator on a restored oyster schooner, and as a gardener at Seattle University’s organic, sustainable campus garden. Before joining IRC, Sarah worked with the Florida Park Service, The Nature Conservancy, the US Fish & Wildlife Service and other agencies in South Florida with a conservation focus. She has worked in a number of regional ecosystems including cypress swamp, scrub, pine flatwoods, maritime hammock, freshwater marsh, coastal strand and the beautiful riverine systems of Florida’s first federally designated Wild and Scenic River, the Loxahatchee. Her primary responsibilities revolved around invasive exotic species removal, prescribed fire, installing native plants, water quality testing, species monitoring, volunteer coordination and environmental outreach and education. Sarah joined IRC in late 2010 as the Program Coordinator for our Pine Rockland Initiative and later was in charge of IRC's Ecological Restoration & Management Program. She stepped into a Research Associate position in 2015.
martin@regionalconservation.org
Sonali Saha, Ph.D.
An all-around lover of plants, Sonali is particularly interested in how plant structure and function affects their ecological distribution. She's excited about how this information can be applied to restoration planning to maintain appropriate plant communities in natural landscapes. A native of India, Sonali received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. She has worked with a variety of plant taxa in different ecosystems including subtropical deciduous forests of the Indian subcontinent, subtropical forests of Argentina, the Florida scrub ecosystem and most recently, pine rockland habitats in the Everglades. Sonali served for several years as IRC's Everglades Vegetation Biologist, a cooperative post with Everglades National Park. Saha co-authored a report titled Sea level rise and South Florida coastal forests published in the journal Climate Change. She is currently working was a visiting faculty member at the University of Miami and as Adjunct Faculty at Touro College, South.
Christina Stocking
Originally from the farmlands of Missouri, Christina grew up with a deep respect for nature but a yearning for the big city life. At the age of 21, she endeavored on a trip to make the dream of big city living a reality and moved to Miami. After 8 years in the field of accounting, she began to miss her connection to nature and decided to return to school to pursue a Bachelor’s of Science in Biology at Florida International University. In 2010, she left accounting for good to fully focus on her new love, botany. Armed with her new found plant knowledge and her reliable accounting skills she was chosen for an internship at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden as the Conservation Research/Plant Records Intern in 2011. During the year-long internship she contributed to the floristic and conservation research being conducted here in South Florida and abroad including the Cockpit Country of Jamaica, the Caribbean Basin and Indonesia. She also contributed to the maintenance of plants records for the garden including the integration of the American Orchid Society’s orchid collection into Fairchild’s Living Collection. After the internship ended and her bachelor’s degree completed, Christina started working for the IRC in 2012 helping to maintain the databases the fuel the many floristic inventories that the IRC has to offer. In addition to database management she also assists in floristic and taxonomic research. With a thirst for knowledge she strives for excellence by continuing her education. She is an ISA Certified Arborist and a Florida Master Naturalist.
Steven W. Woodmansee
A South Florida native, Steve earned a B.S. in Biology from the University of Miami in 1996. Prior to IRC, he worked for two years as a research assistant at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden (FTBG). His duties included vascular plant identification, vegetation mapping and monitoring, and rare plant research. He also served as a naturalist at the Deering Estate at Cutler in Miami for three years. While at the University of Miami, he served as a field assistant to Dr. Carol Horvitz, helping conduct post-hurricane vegetation monitoring in Miami-Dade County. In 1997, he joined IRC assisting with the Floristic Inventory of South Florida, the results of which were published as the book Rare Plants of South Florida : Their History, Conservation, and Restoration (Gann, Bradley & Woodmansee 2002). Since then, Steve has participated in many IRC projects and contributed to a number of exciting botanical discoveries, including a significant new population of an endemic cactus in Biscayne National Park (Bradley & Woodmansee 2002). He has also managed several IRC projects including the floristic inventories of conservation areas in Lee, Martin and Monroe counties. He has deposited over 1400 herbarium specimens at FTBG, including additions to the South Florida flora, and many new county records. Since 2000, he has served as co-chair of the Miami-Dade Native Plant Workshop (NPW), a free program which educates the public in plant identification techniques. He has also served in several leadership positions in the Florida Native Plant Society, including President. Steve is now an active nurseryman, focusing on native plants.