Brad grew up in Ohio but quickly escaped a few times to neighboring states with more exciting flora. He earned an Associate’s Degree in Wildlife Management at Hocking College before transferring to West Virginia University for a Bachelor’s in Wildlife & Fisheries Resources. A lot of his time has been spent on the arid ridge tops of the Appalachians down to the humid muskegs of Michigan, usually looking for rare plants. He’s worked mainly as a naturalist, a “certified bird feeding specialist,” a bobcat necropsy technician, and a tech at West Virginia’s largest herbarium. He fell in love with the North Woods after spending a season at Seney National Wildlife Refuge, and has been with Little Traverse Conservancy (LTC) for 6 years. Brad has led LTC’s ecological condition and response inventory, an survey of every habitat on every preserve.

TSN Conference 2026

January 22nd, 2026 (Thursday) // 1:45 pm – 2:45 pm // Room 104 // Guarding Treasures: A Guide for Assessing Habitat Conditions to Inform Your Management Responses // Protecting land provides the opportunity for conserving habitats and connecting with nature, but stewardship is needed to complete and act on those opportunities. Stewardship can be defined very simply as “wise care” and wisdom requires considering all the facts. Inherent then in stewardship, is the need to have deep knowledge of the lands that are being cared for. We can conserve what we know. This session aims to help land managers with large land holdings develop a framework for gathering ecological knowledge to steward wildlife and their habitats. You are busy and have many responsibilities; being an ecologist is not easy, but we will show why it is necessary and provide examples, ideas, and techniques for how to increase your awareness about the ecological health of the lands you manage and engage in larger landscape-scale conservation. Knowledge-is-key, while a cliché, is vital to identifying degraded lands and then restoring them.