Theresa Menard photo
Theresa Menard
Conservation Planner / GIS Specialist
The Nature Conservancy of Hawai‘i

Theresarocks! The data integrity and mappingcomponents of our ecoregional plan would be nowhere without her! Talkto anyone who knows, and they'll confirm this fundamental truth.However, she is quite tardy with submitting us her short bio, so we arecobbling one together out of Google and other sources:

Theresa was raised on the mainland in urban and suburban settings. When she was 10,  her family visited the Grand Canyon and she firstsaw a park ranger and decided she wanted to be one. But she also wantedto be a hula dancer in Hawai'i. "But by the time I got here (in 1990) my knees were shot from hiking up anddown steep hills," at conservation jobs on the mainland, Theresa said,so she never took a hula lesson.

But working as a biologist for The Nature Conservancy's NaturalHeritage Program for three years in the early 90s,she traveled around the islands, searching for rare plants and animalsand biologically significant areas. Leaving The Conservancy to pursuegraduate education, she studied the biology of the endangered'ōpe'ape'a, or Hawaiian bat (Lasiurus cinereus semotus), which led to a thesis that earned her a MS in Zoology from the University of Hawai'i in 2001. Rejoining the Conservancy in 2002, she has served as Coordinatorof Landscape Conservation Programs statewide, as ConservationPlanner, and as Statewide GIS Coordinator, her currentposition. 

This page last revised 28 August 2008 by S M Gon III