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John Randall, Director

The Nature Conservancy and other conservation agencies and organizations identify invasive species as a top threat to biological diversity conservation in terrestrial, freshwater and marine habitats around the world. What is worse is that harmful new invasions continue to occur, although many of them are preventable.

The Global Invasive Species Team's role is to help The Conservancy and our partners ensure that invasive species of all types, plants, animals, diseases and other microbes, do not eclipse all our efforts to effectively protect native species and natural communities. To this end, GIST is focused on two goals:

1. Preventing harmful new invasions and the spread of invaders at the national and international scale.
   
   
2. Building the capacity of The Conservancy's regions, country and state programs to assess, prevent, rapidly detect and control priority invasive species threats to conservation targets and ecosystems....

I provide direction and leadership to the Global Invasive Species Team and its core staff of six other scientists and public policy experts and our far larger "extended team" of staff with invasive species expertise and responsibilities from across TNC's state, country and regional programs.

The Global Invasive Species Team uses a variety of approaches and works with many partners to achieve our goals. Beginning in late 2004, my focus has been on building our expertise and efforts to prevent new invasions by advancing international and US federal public policies and by engaging businesses and professionals in voluntary programs to change specific business practices which are most likely to unintentionally introduce new invaders. Since that time we have added three new staff members: Stas Burgiel is our Senior Global Invasive Species Policy Advisor, Catherine Hazlewood is our Senior North America Invasive Species Policy Advisor, and Valerie Vartanian is our Horticulture and Landscape Professions Liaison.

Since early 2006 I have been giving more attention to building capacity in TNC's state and country programs. Specifically, we are now inaugurating a project to help senior managers from a pilot set of programs develop realistic, effective invasive species strategic plans. We hope to have a pilot in every one of TNC's eight Conservation Regions and ask staff from the pilot programs to commit to providing guidance and training to other programs in their region once their own plans are completed and can be used as models. The Team also continues to provide tools, training, information and advice to The Conservancy and partner land and water managers and planners, highly regarded services that our veteran staff Barry Rice, Mandy Tu, Tunyalee Martin and I have been providing for many years.

John Randall, Ph.D.
TNC Global Invasive Species Team
Department of Plant Sciences
Mail Stop 4 -- Robbins Hall
University of California
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616-8780 USA

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