Calendar

Dr. Linda Rohleder will present a new nonprofit organization she founded: Wild Woods Restoration Project. The group organizes volunteers to grow native plants for restoration projects in local parks and preserves. They use locally-collected seeds to preserve the genetics of local populations and the biodiversity of local natural areas. She’ll talk about some of the projects the group is working on this year and how you can get involved.

Dr. Rohleder studied at Rutgers University while earning her Ph.D. in Ecology. She worked as a park resource in Monmouth County, NJ, and taught Wetland Plant ID for Rutgers’ Wetland Delineation certification series. Dr. Rohleder created native plant wildlife habitats on her own properties both in New Jersey and New York over the course of 20 years.

Dr. Linda Rohleder recently ended a position as Director of Land Stewardship at the New York - New Jersey Trail Conference where she created and maintained their native plant gardens, through a volunteer group from 2016 through 2021, and conducted restoration projects at sites in NY and NJ parklands.

She simultaneously created the Trail Conference’s Invasives Strike Force volunteer program in 2011. By 2021, the program had trained over 400 invasives-mapping volunteers who collectively surveyed more than 1,500 miles of hiking trails for invasive plants. She organized more than 100 invasives-removal workdays and ran a seasonal conservation corps crew for 7 years to remove invasive plants in parks across southern New York and northern New Jersey. Dr. Rohleder was also the founding coordinator of the Lower Hudson Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (PRISM) in New York leading it for almost ten years. She grew the partnership to over 50 organizations and agencies.