Tom FitzHugh © The Nature Conservancy 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

Tom FitzHugh
Water Management Analyst
Global Freshwater Team

Tom FitzHugh's responsibilities for the Global Freshwater Team include tool and model development, applied research, and GIS analysis and map-making.  He is responsible for managing the development of the new Version 7 of the Indicators of Hydrologic Alteration (IHA) software, a statistical package designed to analyze and assess changes in daily hydrologic data in ecologically meaningful terms. 

He is involved in investigating methods for balancing human and ecosystem needs in municipal water supply planning, and recently published a paper in Bioscience (with Brian Richter) on the impacts of municipal water supply systems on freshwater ecosystems.  He is responsible for applying the IHA and other tools to characterize hydrologic alteration and water budgets across the U.S., to provide a framework for implementing sustainable water management at a national scale. 

Before his work with the Global Freshwater Team, Tom was a part of the Conservancy's Freshwater Initiative, developing a set of GIS tools for conducting freshwater ecoregional assessments, implementing the tools, and training others in how to use them. He has a master's in the environmental monitoring program from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and did his thesis on GIS-based non-point source pollution modeling.