Meet Our Team

Rich Wilson, CPF

Founder and Executive Director of Seatone Consulting (Seatone), Rich Wilson is an award-winning consultant, trainer and IAF Certified Professional Facilitator with more than twenty-five years of experience in resource conservation, sustainable business and public engagement in natural resources management planning. Rich brings a collaborative approach to client engagements that creates durable alliances between resource managers, indigenous communities, the private sector, conservation non-profits and resource users. He specializes in situational assessments, multi-party facilitation, consensus building and conflict resolution. He supports collaborative engagements in the US and internationally.

Prior to founding Seatone in 2010, Rich worked as an international program manager with the Coral Reef Alliance; as a dive team leader with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration–Coral Reef Ecosystem Program; and as a park ranger with the U.S. National Park Service. He regularly supports pro bono causes that foster collaborative engagement in the service of solving natural resource management challenges. In addition to leading Seatone projects, Rich occasionally facilitates multi-party engagements as a senior mediator with Sacramento State University.

Over the course of his career, Rich has designed and facilitated hundreds of multi-stakeholder consensus building collaboratives, public workshops and training-of-trainers on resource management, sustainable business, collaborative policy development and a wide array of natural resource management topics and issues.

Countries of Experience

Anguilla, The Bahamas, Belize, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Fiji, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Montserrat, Micronesia, Palau, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, United States (California, Washington D.C., Hawaii)

Education and Professional Affiliations

• Bachelor of Arts, History – California State University, Chico
• Certified Professional Facilitator – International Association of Facilitation
• Roster Member - US Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution
• Certificate in Public Participation – International Association of Public Participation
• Negotiation and Mediation Training – Strauss Institute for Dispute Resolution
• Marine Protected Area Design and Management – Florida International University
• Leadership and Resources Team Member – Caribbean Marine Protected Area Managers Network and Forum

Peter Adler, PhD

Peter S. Adler is a planner, mediator, facilitator, and a principal in ACCORD 3.0, a professional network of consultants specializing in foresight, strategy, and cooperative trouble-shooting. As a planner he works with organizations in the public, private and civic sectors on forward strategy and executive and board alignment. As a mediator, he assists groups to reach agreements on energy, environment, and health controversies. Peter has worked in the government, business and the NGO sectors and taught advanced negotiation courses at the University of Hawaiʻi and California State University Dominguez Hills.

Peter's prior executive experience includes nine years as President and CEO of The Keystone Center (www.keystone.org), Executive Director of the Hawaii Justice Foundation, and Founding Director of the Hawaii Supreme Court’s Center for Alternative Dispute Resolution. He is the author of four books and numerous academic and popular articles and lives and works in Hawaii. Recent projects include a negotiated “Joint Fact Finding” agreement on pesticides used by GMO corn seed producers and their critics and the acceleration of cooperation strategies for the ozone treaty under the UN Montreal Protocol.

Countries of Experience

Australia, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Thailand, South Africa, Western Samoa

Education

• PhD. – Interdisciplinary Social Science (Sociology), The Union Institute
• Master of Science – Sociology and Community Development, University of Missouri
• Bachelor of Arts – English and History, Roosevelt University

Ramon de León, MSc

A native of Uruguay, Ramon de León first moved to the Caribbean in 1997. Prior to coming to the Caribbean he worked as a fisheries scientist, collaborating closely with fishermen along the coastal lagoons of eastern Uruguay and doing biophysical monitoring in France, Brazil and Chile. From 2004 to early 2015 he served as manager of the Bonaire National Marine Park, a world renowned dive destination recognized for its biodiversity conservation programs and pioneering “diver tag” user fee system. In this capacity he was responsible for all aspects of daily park operations. His duties encompassed management of staff, budgets and park resource conservation efforts; law enforcement; design and coordination of research and monitoring programs; coordination of outreach and education; and maintenance of the park. Ramon's long-term involvement in the dive industry made him a good fit as manager of a multi-use marine park where the primary stakeholder is the dive industry. Ramon regularly supports professional development of other park managers in the Wider Caribbean as one of a small group of mentors leading the UNEP-CEP/CaMPAM Mentorship Program.

A long-time conservation practitioner, Ramon possesses expertise in marine protected area design, capacity building and management; sustainable financing mechanisms; biophysical and socioeconomic monitoring; management effectiveness evaluation; fisheries management; sustainable tourism and climate change adaptation. He has a keen understanding of how to effectively engage community stakeholders, resolve conflicts and promote alternative livelihoods that foster sustainable use of coastal and marine resources. Together with other key members of the management team of Stichting Nationale Parken Bonaire (STINAPA Bonaire)—the non-profit charged with managing the Bonaire National Marine Park and the Washington Slagbaai National Park—Ramon has played a leading role in shaping the foundation’s long-term vision, conservation policy and legislative priorities.

Countries of Experience

Brazil, Bonaire, Chile, France, Dominican Republic, Uruguay

Education and Professional Affiliations

• Master of Science – Universidad de Concepcion, Chile
• Environmental Engineering training – Universidad de Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Mentor – UNEP-CEP/CaMPAM Mentorship Program

Meagan Wylie

Meagan Wylie has more than ten years of professional work experience on coastal and marine resource conservation. She has worked on a wide range of issues, including California’s marine protected areas, areas of special biological significance, fisheries management, marine debris, water supply, ecosystem-based management, and climate change adaptation planning. Meagan spent eight years working on marine conservation program initiatives for San Diego Coastkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). During her tenure with San Diego Coastkeeper, she helped form and lead a coalition of 15 southern California non-profit organizations that spearheaded conservation-specific initiatives during the Marine Life Protection Act public planning process. This conservation coalition played a critical role in negotiating marine protected area (MPA) boundaries in the southern California sub-region, leading to successful designation of a network of 37 MPAs from Santa Barbara to the US-Mexico border.

After her successful MPA designation efforts, Meagan’s work with NRDC involved coordination of the design, fabrication and statewide installation of educational signage for these sites. This required keen insight on how to most effectively communicate key messages to target audiences and the wider public. Moreover, the effort required consensus-building among divergent interests regarding sign content, installation locations for 200 signs, periodic single-text negotiation, overcoming permitting obstacles, and determining the most useful and effective way to spend grant funding based on the input and interests of more than 40 collaborative partners. She also worked closely with agency partners to develop strategies for transferring “lessons learned” from this initiative to other statewide MPA collaboration projects.

In addition to her work at Seatone, Meagan serves as a facilitator with the Sacramento State University Center for Collaborative Policy. This work has grounded her in collaborative policy-making, interest-based negotiation, and large stakeholder engagement processes. The job involves a variety of natural resource management issues in the San Diego region, including ecosystem services, wetland restoration, coastal and marine resource management, water quality, water supply, and water data management, among others. In fact, a project she managed and co-facilitated, the Temporal Investigations of Marsh Ecosystems (TIME) project, recently won the California Geographic Information Association’s Advancement in Collaboration Award for its “outstanding application of Geographic Information System technology representing innovative, elegant, or creative techniques.”

Education

B.S. Marine Biology and B.S. Oceanography, Magnum Cum Laude - Hawai`i Pacific University

Countries of Experience

United States

Jos Hill, MAppSc/MBA

Originally from the United Kingdom, Jos Hill has fourteen years experience as a practitioner working at the nexus of conservation and poverty alleviation. Deeply committed to collaborative engagement, Jos approaches her work with a diverse background of knowledge and experience that includes conservation, resource management, marine ecological monitoring, ocean aquaculture and livelihood development, program management, sustainable business planning, non-profit management, and design and delivery of professional training programs.

Jos began her career in Southeast Asia leading volunteer-based coral reef monitoring expeditions in the Philippines and Thailand. In 2001, she founded Reef Check Australia, an award winning non-profit that engages the Australian public, dive tourism industry, resource managers and schools in coral reef monitoring and conservation education. During her time at Reef Check Australia, she was a major contributor to Reef Check’s international volunteer training program and co-authored the popular Methods for Ecological Monitoring of Coral Reefs: A Resource for Managers for the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. She also served two years as the Asia-Pacific Reef Check Coordinator and ran workshops for reef-side communities in Southeast Asia and the Pacific focused on using community-based monitoring to support participatory marine resource management.

After ten years in the Indo Pacific region, Jos moved to San Francisco, California where she has since developed and led incentive based conservation initiatives in the USA, Mexico, Indo Pacific and Caribbean. Jos has worked on rights-based fishery management projects with Environmental Defense Fund and has developed business and operations plans for responsible seafood businesses. She served as Executive Director of Olazul, a non-profit that develops sustainable ocean livelihoods for coastal communities that drive marine conservation. Most recently, she has taken on the role of Associate Director of Conservation Programs for the Coral Reef Alliance, where she leads work in Hawaii and Indonesia.

Countries of Experience

Australia, The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Mexico, Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Thailand, Tonga, USA, Vanuatu

Education and Professional Affiliations

• Masters in Business Administration (Sustainable Business) – Presidio Graduate School, USA
• Masters of Applied Science in Natural Resource Management – James Cook University, Australia
• Bachelor of Science degree with Honors in Biology – University of Leeds in the United Kingdom and a year at Autonoma University in Madrid, Spain
• Packard Environment Fellow – California Fisheries Fund
• Packard Environment Fellow – Seafood Watch, Monterey Bay Aquarium
• Kinship Conservation Fellow
• PERC Enviropreneur Fellow – Property and Environmental Research Center

Ian Drysdale, MA

A native of Central America, Ian Drysdale has worked as a consultant in marine conservation and coastal resources management for more than fifteen years. He started his career with the Bay Islands Conservation Association on the island of Roatán, Honduras, where he developed a sustainability business plan using “volunteer reef-fee tokens” to generate funding for marine resource management. Subsequently, he served as a founding Board member of the Roatán Marine Park, where his revenue-generating concept was adopted and is now a nationally recognized conservation finance mechanism.

Ian has collaborated extensively with the Honduran government, local and international conservation NGOs, universities and private individuals. His efforts—alongside his wife Jenny Myton, the Honduras Field Manager for the Coral Reef Alliance—have led to the creation of two marine protected areas in Honduras: Cordelia Banks, a unique and complex reef system located on the south side of Roatán, and Tela Bay. These two sites host the highest live coral cover discovered to date along the 700 mile Mesoamerican reef system. In his local community of the West End, Roatan Ian helped leverage more than $100,000 in improvements to the community waste water treatment plant and in connecting low-income households to treatment. He has been actively involved with the local Water Board, Polo's Water Association, for over 10 years. This Board has become a national example to follow in the transparent management of funds and water treatment levels attained.

Today Ian is one of the most active coral reef biologists in the Bay Islands and northern Honduras. He currently serves as the Honduras Coordinator for the Healthy Reefs Initiative (HRI), a collaborative coral reef monitoring program that generates user-friendly tools to measure the health of the Mesoamerican reef. As the lead investigator for HRI in Honduras, he co-authored the 2015 Mesoamerican Reef System Report Card, along with a regional team of coral reef scientists. Ian previously consulted with the Nature Conservancy to verify the existence of fish aggregation and spawning sites, and has trained more than a dozen individuals in application of the Atlantic and Gulf Rapid Reef Assessment monitoring protocol in the region.

Ian has also consulted for the World Wildlife Fund, the Belize Tourism Board and served as a primary collaborator on the Bay Islands Management Plan, the State of the Natural Resources of the Bay Islands report and the management plan for the Cordelia Banks Site of Wildlife Importance.In recognition of his exceptional skills, Ian was selected as a 2011 Program Fellow for the Mesoamerican Reef Leadership program, a joint venture of the MAR Fund, Summit Foundation and Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza.

Countries of Experience

Belize, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Peru, United States

Education

• Master of Arts, Sustainable Development – Universidad de Lanús, La Plata, Argentina
• Bachelor of Science, Environmental Engineering – Universidad Católica de Honduras