Scott Sowa
Juli Plant Grainger, Great Lakes Program Director
Great Lakes
Scott Sowa As the Juli Plant Grainger, Great Lakes Program Director, Scott helps to foster collaboration and develop strategies to protect and restore the Great Lakes. © TNC
Areas of Expertise
Fisheries, Freshwater Conservation, Landscape Scale Assessment and Planning
Resources
Biography
As The Nature Conservancy's Juli Plant Grainger, Great Lakes Program Director, Scott helps set the direction and foster collaboration among TNC staff to develop strategies to protect and restore the health of the largest freshwater ecosystem on Earth for people and nature. His role is to ensure that these teams, from across the Great Lakes basin, support partner agencies and organizations in developing complementary portfolios of projects that lead to tangible on-the-ground results and durable policy change grounded in science. These strategies focus on some of the most pressing issues facing Great Lakes fisheries and coastal areas.
Growing up near the shores of Lake Michigan helped shape Scott’s passion for freshwater conservation. From an early age, he saw how the health of nearby lands and waters intimately affected the lives and livelihoods of nearly everyone he knew. Scott joined TNC in 2008 as a Great Lakes Senior Aquatic Ecologist, became TNC's Director of Science in Michigan in 2012, and took on his current role in 2018.
Before joining TNC, Scott served as the Aquatic Resource Coordinator and then the Assistant Director of the Missouri Resource Assessment Partnership. This partnership of 17 state and federal natural resource management agencies is focused on landscape-scale assessment and planning to help inform and foster collaborative natural resource management efforts among the partners. In these positions, Scott led over 40 major projects focused on freshwater conservation, such as leading the first-ever Freshwater Gap Analysis Project for Missouri and the entire Missouri River Basin. He also led the development of the freshwater components for the Missouri Wildlife Action Plan and the National Park Service’s Inventory, Monitoring and Assessment protocols for their Heartland I&M Network. Scott holds a BS in Fisheries and Wildlife from Michigan State University and an MS and PhD in Fisheries and Wildlife from the University of Missouri.