A transition of staff brings new faces to CSERC

      Since joining CSERC, Heidi has been busy sampling water quality in local forest and foothill streams; dealing with study results to send on to agencies; participating in collaborative stakeholder group meetings; assisting with meadow surveys; and doing a variety of website updates. She’s also working to create new environmental education kids games to add to those that draw so many visits to our website.

       Over recent months, Liz has been assisting with CSERC’s often-strained workload by helping with meadow surveys, doing forest monitoring, and attending two different collaborative stakeholder group sessions. She’s also taken on member renewal tasks, donor responses, comment letters for private forest logging plans, comments for land planning projects, and other assignments.

        With the often high level of demands tied to so many environmental issues in the vast local region, a key attribute needed by CSERC staff is to adapt to the widely varying schedules and tasks that make each week different from the next. In 2018 Liz will be taking the lead role in planning and organizing CSERC’s volunteer restoration workday projects. Heidi will play an expanded role in CSERC’s water quality sampling, wildlife surveys, and other field assignments. CSERC is fortunate to have their skills and knowledge to bolster our ongoing efforts.

A little about them: Heidi and Liz bring strong science backgrounds and field experience

      Liz Gregg joined the CSERC team in September of this year. She was born and raised locally in Tuolumne County, but she’s worked in various parts of California as well as in some more exotic locations.   After earning a bachelor’s degree in botany from U.C. Santa Cruz, Liz moved to Hawaii and worked for four years as an archaeologist. Upon returning to California, she spent four years as a botanist with the U.S. Forest Service, working in both the Stanislaus and Eldorado National Forests.

       In 2010, Liz returned to school to earn a master’s degree. She attended the University of Florida to study interdisciplinary ecology with a focus on tropical conservation and development. In pursuing her degree she conducted research in the Peruvian Amazon. After graduation, she focused on non-profit fundraising -- working in the San Francisco Bay Area, Belize, and Mexico. She was eager to have the opportunity to move back to the Sierra Nevada region and to be closer to her family. Liz shares: “I feel fortunate to get to work and play in the Stanislaus National Forest again.”

As she was growing up near Utah’s Zion National Park, Heidi Beswick learned to appreciate public lands and the value of protecting wild areas. She moved to southern California at age 9 and was amazed at the diversity of plants and wildlife in the coastal ecosystem and was captivated by California’s millions of acres of public lands.

She received a B.S. in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution at University of California, Los Angeles, where her primary focus was herpetology - the study of reptiles and amphibians. After graduating, Heidi moved to Oregon to work seasonally for the Malheur National Forest. She performed fieldwork and monitored streams to assess aquatic habitat for bull trout, steelhead, and salmon species, as well as sensitive frogs and salamanders. In 2016, she also worked in the winter for the National Park Service in the Santa Monica Mountains, performing herpetological surveys, monitoring pitfall traps, and often encountering unexpected creatures such as scorpions, spiders, and terrestrial wasps.

Heidi explains: “Although I enjoyed these positions, I came to realize that simply collecting data was not as fulfilling to me as combining fieldwork with environmental advocacy. I wanted to use the information I collected to make a difference in public policy planning, and take a more active role in the protection of wildlife, wild lands, and wild places. I am incredibly excited to be at CSERC, and I’m looking forward to acting as a voice for the environment of this region.”