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 tripled the size of the preserve from 1,100 to 3,330 acres and raised 4.5 million dollars to establish management endowments dedicated to this land. He has also overseen the restoration of over 450 acres to native vegetation. He worked with private, public and tribal partnerships to protect over 56,000 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 as a field biologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, comparing bird species diversity in secondary and primary rainforests. Reed has a B.S. in wildlife management from Arizona State University.