Jonathan Hayes

Jonathan Hayes General Information

Biography

Mr. Jonathan Hayes served as Vice President and Executive Director at the National Audubon Society. Jon had strong conservation expertise through his professional experience at multiple levels of public service. Over the last decade, Jon built strong partnerships between public and private organizations to provide scalable conservation outcomes across multiple types of ecosystems. He specifically focused on meaningful programs that conserved native bird species and the habitats they relied on. Mr. Hayes served with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the Great Plains Landscape Conservation Cooperative where he was responsible for guiding multi-organizational development and implementation of applied research projects. In this capacity, he coordinated landscape-level cooperative projects in a six-state region amongst federal agencies, state wildlife agencies, and multiple non-profit organizations focused on improving conservation effectiveness in western grassland and riparian ecosystems. Additionally, he served with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and the Oaks and Prairies Joint Venture (OPJV), working at a programmatic level to implement regional conservation efforts aimed at restoring declining grassland bird populations. Among his achievements in this role was the development of the OPJV Grassland Restoration Incentive Program, which was responsible for the improvement of grassland habitat quality on over 60,000 acres of private working lands in Texas. Mr. Hayes holds a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Population and Organismic Biology from the University of Colorado and a Master of Science in Natural Resource Conservation from the University of Montana.