About
About George
For more than 40 years George has had the extraordinary opportunity to work for an array of organizations in the public, private for-profit and nonprofit sectors. He has completed hundreds of projects, published more than 100 articles, technical reports, websites, and a book, and given more than 100 presentations to both the general public and technical audiences. He has worked intensively on native plants and rare plant conservation in Florida and the Caribbean, from large-scale floristic efforts to intensive small-scale projects at residential sites and in botanical gardens. He has significant international policy experience and has conducted botanical field work in more than a dozen Latin American and Caribbean countries. George believes in using traditional conservation tools, such as the establishment and management of protected areas, in addition to new approaches including scaling-up ecological restoration to meet global needs, and utilizing regional matrices of protected areas, restored ecosystems, and naturalistic landscapes to recover native plants, animals, and ecosystems. He has extensive experience in directing and managing nonprofit organizations and small businesses, and is equally comfortable in the board room and in the field.
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International Conservation Policy
George is an international leader in ecological restoration and biodiversity conservation. He is currently International Policy Lead for the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) and serves as Executive Director and Chief Conservation Strategist for the Institute for Regional Conservation (IRC). He has extensive experience collaborating with the IUCN, UN Convention on Biological Diversity and other international organizations. He was the lead coordinator of the first edition of the International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration, and is both lead coordinator and first author of the second edition, which was published in Restoration Ecology in 2019 (27(S1): S1-S46, doi: 10.1111/rec.13035). He was a keynote speaker at the 8th World Conference on Ecological Restoration in Cape Town, South Africa.
Landscapes based on Nature
Since the mid-1970s, George has gained broad experience working at the local level on native plant horticulture, and the design, construction, and management of naturalistic gardens and botanical gardens. He is lead author of IRC's Natives For Your Neighborhood, a powerful online tool that provides user-friendly information on native plants and native plant gardening in Florida, as well as floristic websites for South Florida and Puerto Rico. From the 1990s he was a technical consultant for Gemini Botanical Garden, where he was lead designer and garden director from 2010-2017. He has also conduced assessments of botanical gardens in Key West, Florida, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands as part of the Conservation Assessment Program (CAP) under Heritage Preservation.