The Global Freshwater Team Brian Richter, Co-leader Nicole Silk, Co-leader David Harrison, Senior Advisor  Karin Krchnak, Director of International Water Policy Eloise Kendy, Director, Environmental Flows Program Andrew Warner, Senior Advisor for Water Management Robert Wigington, Western Water Policy Counsel Tom FitzHugh, Water Management Analyst Jeff Opperman, Technical Advisor for Water Management Diédre Paterno Pai, Outreach Manager Sharon Davis, Program Coordinator

Paul West 
Technical Advisor
Global Freshwater Team

Paul West is a technical advisor for the Conservancy’s global freshwater team’s work related to river basin management. His current work focuses on integrating terrestrial and freshwater conservation and quantifying the benefits that nature conservation provides people. He uses this information to guide conservation planning, implementation, and monitoring. He currently serves as the Conservancy’s science lead working with IBM to develop a web-based decision support system that will enable people to assess how landcover change affects many benefits that we get from watersheds, including biodiversity, food production, water quantity, and water quality. The projects initial efforts are focused in Paraná and Paraguay rivers in Brazil.  

Paul has two B.S. degrees and an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he concentrated in soil science and restoration ecology. His previous work with the Conservancy ranged from researching the effectiveness of different land management techniques in forests and grasslands, assessing ecological integrity of ecosystems, and helping launch the Conservancy Upper Mississippi River program. He has led several large-scale biodiversity planning efforts for the upper Midwest and southern Canada. 

While working at the Conservancy, he is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Limnology and Marine Sciences Program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, focusing his research on distribution and tradeoffs among ecosystem services in large river basins.