Twan Leenders Joins Watershed Conservancy | News, Sports activities, Jobs

Twan Leenders has joined the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy staff as its new ecological restoration manager.

Twan Leenders has joined the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy staff as its new ecological restoration manager.

“Twan’s passion for conservation, experience and depth of knowledge will take CWC’s conservation activities to a whole new level,” said John Jablonski III, Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy executive director.

Originally from the Netherlands, Leenders has a degree in biology with an emphasis on animal ecology. He worked in Europe, Africa and Central America before coming to the United States in 2000. After arriving in the U.S., Leenders worked as a researcher at Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and later as an assistant professor in the biology department of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. In the years leading up to his move to Western New York, he was Connecticut Audubon Society’s conservation biologist, where he developed innovative conservation and habitat restoration projects throughout the state of Connecticut and oversaw the organization’s more than 2,500 acres of nature sanctuaries that spanned old growth forest, managed grasslands and tidal marshes along the shores of the Long Island Sound.

Closer to home, in Chautauqua County, Leenders has been a conservation partner with CWC through the Roger Tory Peterson Institute, where he served as president for eight years and continues his involvement as the institute’s senior advisor for conservation.

He has been a member of the CWC Conservation Committee since 2012.

As the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy’s new ecological restoration manager. Leenders will collaborate with landowners and conservation partners to carry out restoration projects that improve habitat quality, help reduce environmental impacts and increase the region’s climate resiliency. He will also work with conservancy staff on the management of existing preserves and selection of new conservation projects. Leenders is currently working on resiliency planning and habitat restoration projects with the Jamestown BPU and the Chautauqua County Soil & Water Conservation District and is developing several other initiatives throughout the county.

The projects are part of a larger Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy initiative to develop a collaborative regional conservation strategy. The plan will also lay out a potential framework for future land conservation to ensure that the most critically important natural areas and natural resources in the region are identified and protected as soon as possible.

In his spare time, Leenders is an avid nature photographer who enjoys documenting natural treasures he encounters on his forays into the woods – at home or abroad. His photographs have appeared widely in many books and magazines, including National Geographic, New Scientist and National Wildlife. Even though he loves all aspects of nature, he is admittedly partial to amphibians and reptiles.

Today’s breaking news and more in your inbox