Reed Tollefson

Reed has worked in Kern County for 30 years on wildlife habitat protection and restoration in the watershed of the South Fork Kern River.  He started at Kern River Preserve in 1987 as a seasonal Restoration Ecologist and ended as the Preserve Manager for The Nature Conservancy in 1997.  In that year, he hired on with the new owner as the Preserve transitioned to the National Audubon Society. Since that time, he has worked to triple the size of the Preserve from 1,100 to 3,330 acres and raised 4.5 million dollars to establish a dedicated management endowment. He has also worked with a range of partnerships to support the protection of over 25,000 acres of land in Kern County with an emphasis on the South Fork Kern River Watershed and Transverse Range Wildlife Corridor. Before coming to California, he worked with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama comparing bird species diversity in secondary and primary rainforest. He also worked in Integrated Pest Management in cotton and other row crops in Maricopa County Arizona. Reed has a B.S. in wildlife management from Arizona State University.