People

Graham Wesolowski

Program Director

Graham Wesolowski has been running around California’s wildlands from a young age and turned that into a career in landscape resilience beginning in 2009. In 2013, while a Master’s student at UCSB’s Bren School, he joined the Strategic Environmental Research Initiative for Wildfire and Climate Change. Beginning in 2015, he worked extensively on land conservation and stewardship efforts in the County as the Conservation Manager for the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. His experience in landscape management and stewardship spans disciplines including steelhead restoration, large scale debris flow recovery and managing a commercial land-based aquaculture farm. When he is not helping communities to become more fire adapted, Graham is surfing somewhere along the Central Coast, or taking his kids to the SB Zoo to see the lions.

Molly Mowery, AICP

Molly Mowery is the Executive Director of the Community Wildfire Planning Center (CWPC) and serves as the lead for the Built Environment Resilience Domain. She brings more than fifteen years of land use planning and wildfire mitigation expertise to the RWMP. Molly is working closely with Kelly Johnston, Katie Oran, and local stakeholders to coordinate long term approaches for Santa Barbara’s South Coast. Molly also manages other wildfire planning projects in California and the West. She earned a master’s degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor in Arts from Naropa University.

Kelly Johnston, RPF, FBAN

Kelly is the Operations Manager with the Community Wildfire Planning Center. He brings 30 years of fire management planning and operations experience to the RWMP. Kelly continues to remain active and qualified as a Registered Professional Forester, Fire Behavior Analyst, Ignition Specialist, Chief Fire Officer and an NFPA Wildland and Rural Fire Protection Technical Committee member. Kelly is involved in projects across North America, including a number of California specific projects.

Anne-Marie Parkinson

As the Community Resilience Domain Lead for the RWMP, Anne-Marie Parkinson will work with communities to build strong networks so they can increase their capacity to prepare, respond, and recover from wildfires. After almost losing her home in the 2007 San Diego Witch Creek Fire she has been passionate about wildfire education so communities are prepared for when, not if, the next wildfire occurs. She has five years of experience in fire ecology and recently graduated with a Master’s from the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2021 with a concentration in Conservation Planning. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate for UC Santa Barbara leading projects in chaparral and conifer forests studying post-fire regeneration and the influence of environmental components on burn severity. In her free time, she enjoys SCUBA diving and spearfishing with friends off the beautiful Santa Barbara coast.

Dr. Marc Mayes

Dr. Marc Mayes is an environmental scientist and remote sensing expert.  He leads research and projects that inform landscape management for climate change adaptation, including forest, woodland and shrubland habitat conservation, water and soil resource conservation, and mitigation of natural hazards such as wildfire. Dr. Mayes’ expertise includes applications of satellite, manned aircraft and drone-based remote sensing for environmental monitoring at site to watershed scales.  His projects have addressed forest conservation planning in East Africa and Mexico, monitoring water stress in riparian woodlands of the US southwest, and California oak woodland conservation, including mitigation of goldspotted oak borer (GSOB) invasions across southern California in a collaborative project with the US Forest Service.  Dr. Mayes has been working in Santa Barbara County landscapes since 2018 with a focus on wildfire hazard mitigation and post-fire ecosystems recovery.  He led an assessment of flood infrastructure performance after the Thomas Fire and January 2018 debris flows, and is involved with ongoing research on interactions of grazing management and fire behavior at UC Santa Barbara’s Sedgwick Reserve.

Dr. Mayes joins SIG-NAL after having worked at UC Santa Barbara’s Earth Research Institute (ERI) as an Associate Specialist in Earth sciences and remote sensing since 2018.  From 2016-2018, Marc was a Nature Conservancy NatureNet Postdoctoral Fellow, based between UCSB and Princeton University. Marc received his Sc.B. in Geology and Chemistry from Brown University, an M.S. in Environment and Resources from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute, and his PhD in Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences from Brown University (Brown University-Marine Biological Lab Joint PhD Program).