SFBJV Staff
Jemma Williams, Conservation Program Coordinator
Our new Conservation Program Coordinator is Jemma Williams, who will join us on September 26. Jemma grew up in the foothills of California just outside of the Yosemite Valley, where she developed a deep appreciation for the natural world, climbing, and getting her hands dirty helping with local environmental initiatives. Over the past eleven years, she has worked in the public, private, and non-profit sectors supporting community-based stewardship, restoration planning, and biological monitoring.
Jemma attended Cal Poly Humboldt where she graduated with a BA in Geography and Natural Resources with an emphasis in mapping sciences and cartography. She then served two terms as an AmeriCorps member with the Watershed Stewards Program placed at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, where she developed her wetland and ‘stream legs’ while performing amphibian and salmonid spawner surveys in north coast watersheds.
She continued with her applied stewardship work through seasonal terms with the USDA Forest Service performing both rare plant surveys and leading Youth Conservation Corps crews in invasive plant management. While at the Great Basin Institute she led a crew in ecological monitoring on BLM land in both California and Nevada in support of data-informed rangeland management.
She landed in the Bay Area six years ago to work for the Sonoma Ecology Center as a Restoration Specialist managing and implementing riparian restoration projects throughout the Sonoma Valley watershed. From there she climbed over the Mayacama Mountain range for the Conservation Program Assistant position with the Napa Resource Conservation District (RCD) where she managed citizen science and oak woodland mapping projects, facilitated a countywide wildlife lecture series, performed fisheries and amphibian monitoring, and managed RCD outreach and volunteer event coordination.
For the past four years, Jemma has worked as a Senior Biologist for WRA Environmental Consulting where she performed wetland delineations, biological monitoring, special status species surveys, and managed regulatory permitting for tidal marsh, riparian, and wetland restoration and mitigation projects throughout the Bay Area. In this role, she often supported local government agencies with regulatory compliance and identified and monitored a variety of restoration and mitigation sites.
Outside of work she enjoys reading, digging in her garden, traveling, hiking, photographing nature/wildlife, or working with herbs and fermented foods. She is also a certified yoga teacher and is interested in the anatomy of the human body and experience.
One of her superpowers is connecting people to people as well as people to places, and she is excited for the opportunity to apply her experience in supporting the SFBJV’s mission. She’s looking forward to meeting and collaborating with the partners soon! Learn more about Jemma here.
