Tribal Forestland Acquisition & Management Panel
Phil Rigdon
Phil Rigdon is an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and grew up on the Yakama Reservation in Southcentral Washington State. Phil has been the Superintendent of Yakama Nation’s Natural Resources Department since May 2005 and has worked for the Tribe since June 1989. He represents the Yakama Nation on the Yakima Basin Integrated Plan Executive Committee, Yakima River Basin Watershed Enhancement Project Workgroup & Conservation Advisory Group, the Washington State’s Columbia River Policy Advisory Group, Tapash Sustainable Forest Collaborative, and the Hanford Natural Resource Trustee Council. Phil also served as President of the Intertribal Timber Council for five years. Phil obtained a BS in Forest Management from the University of Washington and a Masters of Forestry from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Joe Sambataro
Joe Sambataro serves as Conservation Advisor in the Restoration, Acquisition, and Stewardship Program of the Natural and Cultural Resources Department at the Tulalip Tribes of Washington. As a seasoned professional with 20 years of experience in conservation transactions and financing, Joe manages acquisitions of forestland and floodplain to protect Treaty-retained resources. In the last two years, we employed $10M in grant funds to conserve 568 acres of floodplain and estuary lands, and I had the privilege of managing the acquisition process of Project Skyline: bəlkʷtxʷ ti swatixʷtəd (Return the Land), securing 17,790 acres of forestland for future generations of the Tulalip Tribes. On and off reservation, Tulalip now owns and manages approximately 27,000 acres of forest land for timber harvest, fish and wildlife, tribal member access, cultural uses, and carbon sequestration.
Daniel Ebling
Daniel Ebling is the Business Development and Economic Policy Director for the Quinault Indian Nation. Daniel directs key policy and organizational efforts that support the prosperity, economic sovereignty, and technology governance strategy of the Nation. Previously, Daniel has served in leadership roles with his tribe for over 10 years, including as an enterprise board member, as the Nation’s Deputy Chief Financial Officer, and as a Senior Budget Manager. Daniel is a citizen of the Quinault Indian Nation and proud father of four. Daniel holds bachelors degrees in business administration and accounting from Western Governor’s University.
Estakio Beltran
Longer Rotation Forestry in Practice at Port Blakely
Gareth Waugh
Gareth Waugh serves as the incoming President of Port Blakely’s US Forestry Division. He has a 25-year tenure with the company in the United States and in his native New Zealand. In his role, Gareth provides leadership for the Wildlife, Operations, and Resources teams at Port Blakely, aligning their efforts with the organization’s mission of cultivating a healthy world guided by values of stewardship and respect.
Gareth is an alumnus of the University of Washington, where he earned his MBA, and the University of Canterbury, where he holds degrees in Forestry Science and Commerce. Additionally, he graduated from the Washington-based AgForestry Leadership program as part of the Class 40 cohort.
Dr. Paula Swedeen
Dr. Paula Swedeen is Conservation Northwest’s Policy Director working out of Olympia. She represents us on wildlife and wildlands policy issues at the state capitol and beyond, including wolf conservation, forest policy, and more. Paula has worked on habitat conservation issues around the Pacific Northwest for 24 years and even served on Conservation Northwest’s board in the early ‘90s. She worked for 12 years as a wildlife biologist and endangered species policy analyst with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Washington Department of Natural Resources, and she now serves on Washington’s Forest Practices Board and Wolf Advisory Board. Her recent work involves creating markets and ecosystem service payments to incentivize better habitat conditions on private lands where the regulatory reach is limited. Paula has a B.S. in Biology from Indiana University, a Masters of Environmental Studies and Political Science from Western Washington University, and a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on Ecological Economics from the Union Institute.
Management & Conservation of Old Forests in the PNW: Reflections from a Volgenau Climate Initiative Retreat
Rachel Baker
Rachel Baker is the Forest Program Director at Washington Conservation Action. She leads a team that promotes ecological forest management to address the climate and biodiversity crises and support community resilience. Prior to WCA, Rachel’s career focused on international forest conservation and sustainable development. At Earthworm Foundation, Rachel partnered with the private sector to eliminate deforestation and social exploitation in global commodity supply chains. Rachel previously managed the forest campaign at the Bank Information Center, where she advocated for forests and forest peoples in multilateral development finance. She has also carried out field research on ecosystem services and community and indigenous forest use in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Darién, Panama. Rachel serves as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of Forest Stewardship Council US. Rachel holds a Master of Forestry and a Master of Environmental Management from Duke University.
Derek Churchill
Derek Churchill currently works as a senior forest health scientist for the Washington Department of Natural Resources. He leads cross ownership landscape evaluations and monitoring of forested landscapes across eastern and western Washington for WA-DNR’s strategic forest health plans. Prior to DNR, he was a research scientist at the School for Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington focusing on restoration of dry and moist forests. He also ran his own forestry consulting company for 13 years and worked with a wide range of private and public landowners in the Pacific Northwest. He lives on Vashon Island where he has been involved in community forestry for over 20 years.
David Walters
David Walters is the Vice-President of Acquisitions and Business Development for Green Diamond Resource Company, a private timber company with approximately 2.3 million acres owned and/or managed in the United States. David oversees forestland and other real estate transactions, conservation easements, forest carbon offset projects, renewable energy opportunities, and various other initiatives. His educational background includes an undergraduate degree in Forest Management from Oregon State University, an MS in Forest Biometrics from Virginia Tech, and a PhD in Biometrics from the University of Minnesota. Before joining Green Diamond in 2019, he held a variety of positions at Pope Resources, LandVest, Roseburg Forest Products, the University of Minnesota, and Boise Cascade.
Sarah Billig
Sarah Billig is the President of FSC US. A passionate proponent of well-managed forests with more than two decades of experience with the Mendocino Family of Companies in Northern California, Sarah’s achievements include growing an FSC group certificate to cover 100,000 acres of family-owned forests in California, maintaining FSC certification across 440,000 acres of timberland, and overseeing chain of custody certification for multiple mills, distribution centers, and wood treatment facilities. While at Mendocino, Sarah also spearheaded the company’s first two carbon projects and led outreach activities with local and regional tribes and stakeholders. Her intimate field and management experience coupled with her dedicated service on the US board equip Sarah with a distinctive vantage point to drive FSC US forward through its next era of progress and influence.
Breakout Session 1. Amazon’s Regional Criteria for Sustainable Mass Timber Sourcing
Kristen Dotson
Kristen Dotson is a dedicated sustainability professional with extensive experience in green building performance, building certifications, Scope 3 embodied carbon, mass timber, healthy materials, and sustainability implementation & process improvement. She is currently leveraging all of these skills and experiences for Amazon’s Worldwide Sustainability organization as part of the Sustainable Buildings team.
Throughout her career, she has focused on supporting and catalyzing sustainability achievement in hundreds of building projects while driving organizational change in real estate portfolio delivery. She continues to be a technical consultant, certification bar raiser, carbon accountant, owner’s representative, contractor trainer, and general troublemaker/catalyst for positive change everywhere she goes.
Jacob Dunn
Jacob Dunn’s upbringing in rural Idaho fostered a profound sense of community and environmental stewardship that inspires his work to this day. As a building performance specialist who brings together architecture, science, and sustainability, he explores the link between aesthetics and analytics to create high-performance projects that cultivate a stronger relationship with the natural world. He’s also known for his expertise in mass timber, with deep knowledge of how sustainable and transparent procurement impacts local ecology, regional economies, and global carbon emissions. Whether Jacob is simulating building physics with computational design, collaborating with universities on research initiatives, or working on new life cycle analysis tools for mass timber—his goal is to help redefine the relationship between our buildings and the land and communities they come from.
Paul Vanderford
Paul Vanderford is Senior Director of Sustainable Northwest’s Wood Markets Program, working with wood product companies, supply chains, and forest owners across North America. As an ISO 9001 Lead Auditor with over 18 years of experience, he has developed the wood advisor role to connect projects with the people and forests producing their wood. His work bridges urban and rural communities through local wood sourcing, supporting jobs and landscape restoration.
Collaborating with tribes, mass timber fabricators, leading construction and architectural firms and public and private landowners, Paul offers project teams ways to credibly track and trace wood, celebrating values beyond third-party certification.
Seth Zuckerman
Seth Zuckerman has served since 2017 as executive director of Northwest Natural Resource Group (NNRG), a Seattle-based nonprofit that promotes and demonstrates the practice of ecological forestry in western Washington and Oregon. With his colleague Kirk Hanson, he is the author of A Forest of Your Own: The Pacific Northwest Handbook of Ecological Forestry (Mountaineers Books, 2024), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in the General Nonfiction category.
His roots are in northern California, where he directed the Wild and Working Lands program at the Mattole Restoration Council. As a journalist, he has written about forests, salmon, and the communities that depend on them for numerous publications, including The Nation, Sierra, Orion, and High Country News. He holds an M.S. in Energy and Resources from the University of California at Berkeley, and an A.B. in Energy Studies from Stanford. He came to the Northwest in 2013 in search of steadier precipitation and lives with his family on an island in Puget Sound.
Breakout Session 2. Catalyzing Carbon Financing to Accelerate Place-Based, Nature-Based Enterprise
Dr. Tanushree Biswas
Dr. Tanushree Biswas, a dynamic climate leader and systems change expert with over two decades of experience driving measurable climate and biodiversity outcomes globally through innovative finance and technology. She is a leading authority on leveraging innovative data science tools to design financing pathways and to de-risk high-impact conservation. Dr. Biswas pioneered a self-sustainable financing pathway for community and Indigenous-led projects. This model generates continuous revenue through high-quality carbon removals, directly ensuring long-term funding for ecosystem restoration and local stewardship to deliver both climate resilience and durable socio-economic benefits to the communities on the front lines of conservation.
Dr. Biswas is the Carbon Program Director for the Emerald Edge at The Nature Conservancy. Her work is focused on translating the vast potential of Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) into viable, equitable, place-based enterprises across the Pacific Northwest and Global South.
Trishala Thakur
Trishala Thakur is a machine learning data scientist specializing in building AI systems that accelerate decision-making through scalable data solutions. With experience spanning predictive analytics, deep learning, and automation.
In collaboration with The Nature Conservancy, Trishala is building a geospatial prioritization tool that identifies high-value parcels for Natural Climate Solutions investment. This tool empowers decision makers to make data-driven steps about where to deploy resources for maximum carbon sequestration and biodiversity impact.
Currently at the University of Chicago, Trishala develops AI pipelines processing large-scale datasets, building multi-agent systems for research automation and leveraging deep learning to extract insights from texts/images.
Previously, Trishala designed predictive maintenance systems at Schneider Electric and developed satellite-based drought forecasting models using deep learning. She holds an MS in Data Science from the University of Colorado Boulder.
Breakout Session 1. Forest Management in Wood Product Accounting Using the TIMBER Model
Stephanie Carlisle
Stephanie Carlisle is the LCA Practice Lead at C.Scale, a climate-tech startup democratizing access to whole-life carbon data and design strategy, where she leads development of the platform’s LCA accounting and methods. Her research focuses on complex questions related to whole-life carbon accounting, novel materials, land management, and building design. She has worked on the development of several WBLCA tools and has contributed to state and federal policy. Stephanie is also a lecturer at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on life cycle assessment, building materials, and urban ecology.
Dr. David Diaz
Dr. David Diaz is a lifelong student of the “tall people” and a Native Texan (a mestizo descendant of the Coahuiltecan people). Over the past 20 years, David has worked as a reporter covering international climate policy and carbon markets, wrote a how-to guide for forest carbon projects, designed new carbon accounting methodologies, and managed a portfolio of carbon offset projects before finding his path as a data scientist. For the past decade, he has applied ecosystem and geospatial data science to improve forest planning and monitoring systems used by thousands of landowners across Oregon and Washington. He holds a B.A. in Environmental History from Harvard, an M.S. in Soil Science from OSU, and a Ph.D. in Forestry from UW. At Vibrant Planet, David leads research and development related to growth-and-yield modeling, climate smart commodities, and tribal forestry. You can find David around Seattle where he and his wife Abby are learning along with their dog Melvin to take more deep breaths and to hunt truffles.
Breakout Session 2. Accelerating Prescribed Fire: The Role of Prescribed Burn Associations in Washington
Lucas King
Lucas King oversees the Fire & Fuels Program at Mount Adams Resource Stewards, leading prescribed fire operations, fuels management, and the Stewardship Crew. A lifelong Trout Lake resident and former Washington DNR Wildland Fire and Forest Health Specialist, Lucas channels his deep connection to the Mt. Adams landscape into advancing cross-boundary, community-based fire management. He also serves as Assistant Chief of the Trout Lake Volunteer Fire Department, co-founded the Mount Adams Prescribed Burn Association, and sits on the board of the Washington Prescribed Fire Council—helping grow Washington’s good-fire movement from the ground up.
Colin Sternagel
Colin Sternagel is the owner and founder of Ecological Services, a business with the intent to “Restore Ecological Functions Through Beneficial Human Action.” Having spent most of his early life and professional career in the beautiful landscapes of the Pacific Northwest- as a river guide, dive master, sailing captain, and outdoor recreationist. Colin couldn’t help but recognize the landscapes changing and the cherished resources of the NW in peril. Inspired by the teachings of indigenous land management practices Colin began to acknowledge the importance humans and culture have been as keystone species on the landscape. Not formally trained in ecology and environmental studies, Colin focused Ecological Services as a labor provider creating good jobs, for local people, working on their local lands. ES predominantly is working in Central Washington doing forest health thinning projects, low tech creek restoration, and prescribed fire. ES with the Cascadia Conservation District founded the Cascadia Prescribed Burn Association in 2023, ES continues to coordinate the association and provide prescribed fire services for local landowners and managers.
Stewardship Economy for Forest Health & Rural Resilience
Mayor Dan Rankin
Mayor Dan Rankin grew up exploring the Cascade Mountains through fishing, hunting and hiking. His grandfather came to Darrington in 1919 and ran a butcher shop for the large logging and mining camps. His father, Glen, was raised in the Town and owned a gypo (small-scale) logging operation that pioneered skyline logging. Dan has been a business owner since 1991 and currently owns and operates a one-man sawmill specializing in custom orders of regionally sourced species. Rankin and his wife, Kelli Smith, an architect, raised their two sons in a house they designed and built on the family’s tree farm.
Rankin served on the Darrington Town Council for 8 years before being elected Mayor. Since taking office in 2012, Mayor Rankin has continuously worked to bring diversity to the local job market in hopes of creating long term resilience throughout the Stillaguamish and Sauk Valleys. Partnering with local, private, state, and federal partners, Rankin has been committed to stabilizing the community and economy following the SR 530 landslide. Dan is the co-founder and co-chair of the Darrington Collaborative which fosters partnership between conservation groups, the timber industry, and the U.S. Forest Service. Currently, Dan is spearheading the Town’s effort to develop 30 acres of a 60 acre industrial site focused on wood innovation and education.
Laurel Harkness
Laurel Harkness is the Coalition Director of the Rural Voices for Conservation Coalition, working to advance collaborative, place-based conservation solutions that support both land stewardship and rural community well-being across the West. Laurel has a diverse background in both economic development and natural resources. Prior to joining RVCC, she served in the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development working to support resilient, equitable, and sustainable economies in rural communities. In 2024, Laurel was appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture to serve on the U.S. Forest Service Northwest Forest Plan Federal Advisory Committee. Laurel earned a B.S. in Soil & Water Science from U.C. Davis, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Rural Policy and a Masters in Public Policy from Oregon State University. Laurel is based in Mt. Shasta, CA.
Stewardship Economy for Forest Health & Rural Resilience
Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove
Commissioner of Public Lands Dave Upthegrove has dedicated his life and career to public service and our public lands. After studying environmental science and energy policy in college and graduate school, he began his career in public service at the Washington statehouse, representing the working-class suburbs of South King County in the Washington House of Representatives for over a decade. He then went on to serve on King County Council for 12 years – including three as chair – where he advanced sustainable policies across the largest county in Washington State. In January, he made history when he became the first out LGBTQ statewide executive in Washington’s history.
