damian rawoot

THE NATURE CONSERVANCY

I grew up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and spent much of my childhood canoeing and fishing on the North Fork of the Shenandoah River and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. After receiving my BA in Political Science from Emory University, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama’s Darién Province working with cattle ranchers, indigenous communities, and government partners to address watershed degradation and community health issues. That experience pushed me to pursue a career in conservation and guides my approach to collaborative, community-based conservation, particularly in working landscapes.

After the Peace Corps, I spent almost four years working for the US Forest Service’s International Programs managing capacity building projects in Oman, Israel, the West Bank, Malawi, Botswana, and Namibia focused on forestry and rangeland management, protected area management, and disaster response. Building on this professional experience, I completed a MS in Natural Resources with an emphasis on rangeland ecology and restoration from the University of Arizona and conducted research funded by the Desert Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) focused on the role of private land conservation in the Sky Island region of Arizona and New Mexico to achieve large landscape conservation outcomes. In this time, I also co-led of the Desert LCC’s Grassland and Shrubland management team.

In 2017, I joined The Nature Conservancy and serve as Senior Land & Water Protection Manager for the Arizona Chapter, leading efforts to protect key landscapes across Southern Arizona. Preserving and enhancing the resiliency of our native grasslands is critical to my work given the range of biodiversity they support, their role in watershed health and landscape connectivity, and importance to human communities. I also have the pleasure of supporting TNC’s global work assessing opportunities and developing strategy to complete large, protected area expansions in Chile, Colombia, and Brazil. In my free time, I enjoy exploring our local Sky Island mountains with my wife and two sons and visiting family in Argentina, India and beyond.