EcoBridges Environmental Consulting is a vehicle for founder Anne Wallace to serve clients and colleagues with 34 years of accumulated interests, skills, experiences, trainings, and certifications. EcoBridges represents a bridging of varied interests and abilities.

EcoBridges has the following certifications and permits:

• Caltrans/CUCP DBE/SWBE certification: 34955
• CPUC WBE certification: 6KN00011
• City of Sacramento Small/Emerging Business: 32525
• City of Grass Valley business license: 11571
• Federal 10(a)(1)(A) recovery permits: vernal-pool branchiopods, California tiger salamander, California least tern, and California clapper rail
• California scientific collecting permit
• State MOU for California least tern and California tiger salamander

 
Principal and founder of EcoBridges, formerly cofounder of Ibis Environmental, Anne has been a working biologist since 1982, an environmental consultant since 1986, an environmental consultant in California since 1990, a certified wildlife biologist since 1992, and a business owner since 1995. Her MS in Wildlife Science was received from Utah State University in 1988.

In 34 years, her professional pursuits have included

• research, inventory, survey, trapping, tagging, writing, recommending, and analyzing
• endangered birds, mammals, amphibians, fishes, reptiles, invertebrates, and plants, and
• sensitive and endangered habitats such as wetlands, vernal pools, and riparian systems

• in compliance with NEPA, CEQA, state/federal endangered species acts, the federal Clean Water Act, and most other relevant local, state, and federal regulations
• including surveys, impact assessment, environmental compliance, and mitigation development
• in riparian, desert, coastal, woodland/forest, grassland, lowland, and mountain habitats
• for biological assessments, EA/ISs, EIR/EISs, Caltrans NESs and NES-MIs
• in the Sierra foothills, the Modoc Plateau, northeastern California (Modoc and Lassen counties), northern Central Valley, southern Central Valley, the Coast Ranges, San Francisco Bay estuary, and the Gold Country (Sierra foothills)
• and in Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Florida, New York, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico
• for pipelines, transmission lines, highways, recreation trails, mine-site reclamation, geothermal development, Air Force airspace actions, wind farms, FERC hydroelectric relicensing, vegetation management programs, and marsh restoration
• for cities, counties, state agencies, federal agencies, consulting firms, utilities, and nonprofits.

Her primary focus and first love have been identification, biology, and distribution of birds, especially raptors and wetland/riparian species. Much of her experiential background has been in and around freshwater wetlands, wet meadows, salt marshes, riparian zones, and their associated uplands, particularly in northern California and northern Utah.

But her professional experience base is broad and includes, birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, invertebrates (VELB, vernal pool branchiopods), and a few plants.

Anne has

• flown and piloted (as a private pilot for several years in the 1980s) many aerial surveys of waterfowl and white pelicans
• ground-surveyed nesting waterfowl and shorebirds
• trapped, banded, and counted migrating raptors
• banded raptor nestlings
• surveyed and banded nesting colonial seabirds
• conducted USFWS breeding bird surveys and Christmas bird counts, as well as annual, ongoing point-count bird surveys for a variety of restoration projects in the Sierra foothills
• ground-surveyed sandhill cranes and their nests
• located sandhill crane nests by helicopter
• located suitable foothill yellow-legged frog habitats by helicopter
• walked countless miles of Sierra streams and rivers for foothill yellow-legged frog egg masses, tadpoles, subadults, and adults
• visited countess ponds, vernal pools, and other aquatic habitats for California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, fairy and tadpole shrimp, and western pond turtles
• walked countless miles of California's Central Valley for San Joaquin kit foxes, blunt-nosed leopard lizards, and burrowing owls and their dens, and for tricolored blackbird colonies
• conducted dozens of protocol and preconstruction San Joaquin kit fox surveys (den searches, track plates, photo-bait stations, nighttime spotlighting, den dusting, den excavation/exclusion)
• video-scoped small-mammal burrows for blunt-nosed leopard lizards and giant kangaroo rats
• set and monitored a number of small-mammal traplines
• surveyed for and monitored Swainson's hawk nests
• trapped, tranquilized, and tagged American marten in the Uintah Mountains of eastern Utah
• conducted night surveys for the endangered Puerto Rican boa in the karst forests of Puerto Rico
• been monitoring a nesting colony of California least terns at a wetland-restoration site in Solano County since 2007
• spent countless predawn and dusk hours listening for the breeding songs and calls of California clapper rails, California black rails, southwestern willow flycatchers, least Bell's vireos, and other breeding birds
• flown a dozen or more helicopter surveys to photograph and map unmaintained swimming pools for West Nile virus prevention
• prepared innumerable technical reports, BAs, BEs, NESs, and NES-MIs
• contributed to countless CEQA/NEPA documents
• and surveyed or studied many other California sensitive wildlife, following approved protocols where appropriate, including western spadefoot, San Francisco garter snake, giant garter snake, northern goshawk and other raptors, spotted owl (northern and California subspecies), salt-marsh harvest mouse, western snowy plover, Carson wandering skipper (a butterfly), and a few rare plants