I am the Associate Director of Conservation and Land Management at The Wilderness Center (TWC) in Stark County, Ohio. TWC owns >2,000 acres and holds easements over an additional >1,000 acres across 7 counties in Northeast Ohio.

I was previously the Forest Health Project Coordinator for Cleveland Metroparks, mainly focusing on beech leaf disease. BLD is spreading quickly across northeast Ohio into Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario. Our efforts included mapping the range of BLD, looking at how severely forests are affected over time, and determining how fast the disease progresses, possibly leading to mortality.