David Anderson is the Director and Chief Scientist of the Colorado Natural Heritage Program (CNHP). He has worked at the Colorado Natural Heritage Program since 1999, when he joined the staff as an assistant botanist.
As CNHP Director, Dave has been active in service to the NatureServe network. He served as a West Region rep on the US Section Council from 2008-2017, co-authoring during that time the Guidelines for Network Interaction to support our collaborative efforts as a Network. He represented the Section Council twice at the Joint Member Management Meeting (J3M), assisting with the development and implementation of strategic plans. He organized a staff exchange with Florida Natural Features Inventory and loves to collaborate with other Heritage Programs. In 2014 he received a Fulbright Specialist Award to work at the Wildlife Institute of India in an exchange of methodology for tracking rare species.
Prior to his career at CNHP, Dave spent years doing fieldwork, including five field seasons in the Arctic. These included two seasons with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, collecting plants and mapping vegetation in Alaska, and completing his graduate research on Devon Island in Nunavut, Canada, the Earth’s largest uninhabited island. There he studied the interactions of the sparse polar desert flora with intense freezing and thawing processes called cryoturbation. He and his wife Jen then joined the Peace Corps, serving in the Solomon Islands from 1996-1998, where Dave taught science to 6-8th graders.
Dave grew up in Aurora, Colorado, and holds a BA in Biology from the University of Colorado Boulder and an MS in Botany from the University of Washington. He has lived in Fort Collins, CO, since 1999. He and his wife Jen have two amazing daughters named after plants and a dog named Meadow.
