ABOUT
Ostrya Conservation
Ostrya Conservation, Inc. was founded in 2017, with the vision of supporting environmental conservation efforts by creating value for natural ecosystems and managed lands, developing ecosystem services projects, and providing environmental consulting services to land owners and organizations pursuing market-based conservation projects and alternative natural resource derived revenue streams.
We assist projects and conservation initiatives in a diverse range of ecosystems including forest, wetland, and coastal landscapes with an array of services including project development and management, field-based ecosystem monitoring, and geographic information system.
A genuine love of ecology and a desire to create sustainable financing, which effectively conserves natural ecosystems and other managed lands, drives the efforts of Ostrya Conservation.
James Eaton, Director
Jamie decided to start Ostrya Conservation after working for nearly a decade developing and implementing ecosystems services projects around the world. He has extensive experience in the fields of forest ecology, geographic information systems, soil biogeochemistry, land-use change science, and tropical ecology. He is passionate about using ecosystem markets and conservation tools to improve, conserve and protect native plants, wildlife and fish habitat, and natural ecosystems. Jamie is an aspiring naturalist and community ecologist with a strong interest in sustainable farming, outdoor recreation, and environmental education.
For 10 years, Jamie has led the planning and design, and assisted with the implementation of, conservation projects which have conserved over a million acres of land throughout the world. These ecosystem service projects work with local communities and land owners to provide financing which enable these stakeholders to protect and conserve natural lands. While many of these projects have been in the realm of voluntary and compliance greenhouse gas mitigation projects, he has also developed nutrient banks, wetland mitigation banks, and stream mitigation banks. Project management skills and consulting experience has allowed Jamie to pull together diverse stakeholders’ including private individuals, environmental nongovernmental organizations, public companies, and government agencies in pursuit of these conservation efforts worldwide. His conservation project development and research experience has been global in scale including work in Brazil, the Caribbean, Chile, China, Ecuador, Ireland, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, Tanzania, Uganda, and throughout the United States.
Jamie hails from the mid-west but he fell in love with the Virginia mountains, piedmont, and coastal regions upon moving here in 2001 after completing a B.A. in Biology from Saint Louis University. He obtained a M.S. in Environmental Science with a concentration in Forest Ecology from the University of Virginia, after spending three summers battling mosquitos while measuring biomass and soils in the dry tropical forests of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. As a 2005-2006 Fulbright Scholar, he worked to better understand ecological succession and land-use change in central Europe’s Carpathian Mountains. In 2009, he was part of an interdisciplinary team to win the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America.