Brian Donahue is Professor Emeritus of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University, and a farm and forest policy consultant. He holds a PhD from the Brandeis program in History. He co-founded and for 12 years directed Land’s Sake, a non-profit community farm in Weston, Massachusetts, and now co-owns and manages a farm in western Massachusetts. He sits on the board of The Massachusetts Woodland Institute, and The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Donahue is author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town (1999), and The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (2004). He is co-author of Wildlands and Woodlands and A New England Food Vision.

Dr. Tara Keyser is a Research Forester and the Director of the Center for Forest Restoration and Management with the USDA FS, Southern Research Station located in Asheville, North Carolina. She has a BS in Forest Ecology and Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a MS and PhD in forest sciences from Colorado State University. Tara’s current research program focuses on the sustainable management and restoration of upland hardwood in the eastern US. She has extensive experience in implementing large, at-scale experimentally designed silvicultural studies that provide the science-based information necessary to refine existing and develop new silvicultural methods and tools in upland oak ecosystems across the eastern US.

Dr. Steven Latta is the Director of Conservation and Field Research at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. A native of Michigan, he was educated at Kalamazoo College (B.A.), University of Michigan (M.S.), and University of Missouri-Columbia (Ph.D. in Avian Ecology). After graduating in 2000, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Missouri-St. Louis where he studied with Dr. Robert Ricklefs the evolution and diversification of avian malaria across Caribbean islands. He then served for four years as the Director of the Latin American Program at Point Reyes Bird Observatory in California, where he developed long-term monitoring programs in many countries, and trained hundreds of locally-based biologists and naturalists in standardized bird monitoring techniques.

Emily Wojtyna is a biologist with a Master of Science in Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics from the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich, Germany. They also hold a certificate in Environmental Studies from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU. In their free time, they love foraging and expanding their knowledge of the natural world. For their thesis, Emily utilized a chronosequence approach to conduct vegetation surveys in forest gaps created by the Foundation for Sustainable Forests and analyzed the dynamics of key habitat resources for both early-successional and mature-forest birds. For their Environmental Studies capstone project, they wrote and self-published a cookbook of local edible mushroom species titled The Amateur Forager’s Cookbook: Featuring Edible Wild Mushrooms of Western Pennsylvania. In addition to their M.S., Emily also holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences with a Chemistry minor from the University of Pittsburgh and graduated with high honors (summa cum laude).

Cassandra Ziegler is a Biological Sciences Ph.D. student at Duquesne University. A western Pennsylvania native, she has a BS in Biology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and an MS in Environmental Science and Management from Duquesne University. Cassandra is currently studying avian diet in FSF forests.