EcoBridges Environmental Consulting is a vehicle for founder Anne Wallace to serve clients, colleagues, and friends through 26+ years of accumulated interests, skills, talents, experiences, trainings, and degrees. EcoBridges represents a bridging of varied interests and skills.

EcoBridges is a California corporation with the following certifications and permits.

• Caltrans SWBE certification: 34955
• CUCP DBE certification: 34955
• PUC certification: 6KN00011
• City of Grass Valley business license: 11571
• Federal 10(a)(1)(A) recovery permits: vernal pool branchiopods, California tiger salamander, California least tern, and California clapper rail

 
Principal and founder of EcoBridges, formerly cofounder of Ibis Environmental and formerly Anne Flannery, Anne has been a working wildlife biologist since 1982, an environmental consultant at large since 1986, an environmental consultant in California since 1990, a certified wildlife biologist since 1992, and a business owner since 1995. Her MS in Wildlife Science was received from Utah State University in 1988.

In 26+ years, her professional pursuits have included

• research, inventory, survey, trapping, tagging, writing, speaking, recommending, and analyzing
• endangered birds, mammals, amphibians, fishes, reptiles, invertebrates, and plants, and
• sensitive and endangered habitats such as wetlands, vernal pools, and riparian systems:

• in compliance with NEPA, CEQA, state/federal endangered species acts, the federal Clean Water Act, and most other relevant local, state, and federal regulations
• including surveys, impact assessment, environmental compliance, and mitigation development
• in such habitats as riparian, desert, coastal, woodland/forest, grassland, lowland, and mountain habitats
• in such regions as the Sierra foothills, the Modoc Plateau, northeastern California, Modoc and Lassen counties, northern Central Valley, southern Central Valley, the Coast Ranges, San Francisco Bay estuary, central California coast, and the Gold Country
• in such locations as Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Florida, New York, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico
• for such projects as pipelines, transmission lines, highways, recreation trails, mine-site reclamation, geothermal development, Air Force airspace actions, wind farms, FERC hydroelectric relicensing, and marsh restoration
• and for such clients as cities, counties, state agencies, federal agencies, utilities, private developers, and nonprofits.

Her primary focus and first love have been identification, biology, and distribution of birds, especially raptors and wetland/riparian species. Much of her experiential background has been in and around freshwater wetlands, wet meadows, salt marshes, riparian zones, and their associated uplands, particularly in northern California and northern Utah, but her professional experience base is broad.

She has

• flown and piloted (as a private pilot for several years in the 1980s) many aerial surveys of waterfowl and white pelicans
• ground-surveyed nesting waterfowl and shorebirds
• trapped, banded, and counted migrating raptors
• banded raptor nestlings
• surveyed and banded nesting colonial seabirds
• conducted USFWS breeding bird surveys and Christmas bird counts
• ground-surveyed sandhill cranes and their nests
• located sandhill crane nests by helicopter
• walked miles of Sierra streams and rivers for foothill yellow-legged frog egg masses, tadpoles, subadults, and adults
• visited ponds, vernal pools, and creeks for California red-legged frogs, California tiger salamanders, and fairy and tadpole shrimp
• walked miles of California’s Central Valley for San Joaquin kit foxes and burrowing owl and their dens, and for tricolored blackbird colonies
• conducted dozens of protocol and preconstruction San Joaquin kit fox surveys (den searches, track plates, photo-bait stations, nighttime spotlighting, den excavation/exclusion)
• video-scoped small-mammal burrows for blunt-nosed leopard lizards and giant kangaroo rats
• set and monitored small-mammal traplines
• trapped, tranquilized, and tagged American marten in the Uintah Mountains of eastern Utah
• conducted night surveys for the endangered Puerto Rican boa in the karst forests of Puerto Rico
• monitored nesting California least terns at a wetland-restoration site in Solano County (ongoing annual monitoring)
• spent countless predawn and dusk hours listening for the breeding songs and calls of California clapper rails, California black rails, southwestern willow flycatchers, least Bell’s vireos, and other breeding birds
• and surveyed or studied many other California sensitive wildlife, following approved protocols where appropriate, including
  
  
• western spadefoot
• San Francisco garter snake
• western pond turtle
• Cooper's hawk and northern goshawk
• spotted owl (northern and California subspecies)
• Swainson's hawk
• salt-marsh harvest mouse
• western snowy plover
• blunt‑nosed leopard lizard
• giant kangaroo rat
• Carson wandering skipper (a butterfly)
• valley elderberry longhorn beetle
• and a few rare plants