Clint Alexander
President | Practice Area – Water Resource Management
Key skills: decision support tool design, technical facilitation, ecological flow needs assessment, aquatic ecology, cross-disciplinary modelling, multi-objective optimization, research and technical writing, team leadership, and project management.
Clint Alexander’s work focuses on environmental water management where he brings expertise in decision analysis, simulation modelling, information system design, and trade-off analysis. Transitioning from Director of Operations to President as part of ESSA’s succession planning, on November 1 2016 Clint assumed leadership responsibilities of ESSA from David Marmorek (transitioning to Lead Scientist & Sr. Partner). For more than ten years, Clint and Dave together led ESSA’s work in the Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences domain, where many of their projects involved development of sophisticated decision-support tools that integrate diverse data sources to create durable, intuitive visualization methods that help to understand management-ecosystem trade-offs. This includes leading over $3.5M in projects in California (Sacramento River and San Francisco Delta Ecological Flows Tool), the Colorado River Basin, Columbia Basin and the Okanagan Basin. One of these tools, the Okanagan Fish/Water Management Tool, has received both a BC Premier’s Award for excellence in innovation, as well as the Murray A. Newman Award for Significant Achievement in Aquatic Conservation from the Vancouver Public Aquarium. ESSA’s unique Adaptive Management mindset is also at the forefront of a new project awarded to ESSA to develop an integrated fisheries restoration and monitoring plan for the Klamath River system – what could be the largest dam removal and fisheries restoration project in United States history. Clint is very honoured to lead the ESSA team in helping our many valued clients explore the mindset, collaborative outlook and innovative tools needed to sustain healthy ecosystems and human communities.
Clint’s office coffee mug says “real-time innovator” because he has such a deep passion for decision support tools that assist resource managers balance trade-offs in real-time. (Others have suggested his mug motto is more indicative of how he navigates his range of responsibilities and demands). 360 evaluation forms consistently note how staff rely upon Clint during occasional corporate events to select a few delicious wines. Clint is also well regarded as ESSA’s top ‘talent sommelier’, where he routinely oversees recruitment activities including participating in all interviews.
Clint holds a B.Sc. in Applied Ecology from the University of British Columbia and a Masters in Resource & Environmental Management (MRM) from Simon Fraser University. With foundational training under Charles Holmes, Clint is also a seasoned facilitator working with experts and stakeholders to integrate specialized knowledge amongst disciplines. In his role as a facilitator, Clint has designed creative processes sensitive to the distinctive nature of highly technical resource management problems and guided clients to contribute their ideas and resolve barriers. This includes working with small groups of only a few key stakeholders to clarify objectives, medium sized settings tackling requirements analysis questions, to guiding discussions at large community science forums. Clint enjoys collaborating with others, building strategic alliances, untangling problems and clearly communicating trade-offs.
Outside of his work at ESSA, Clint is a very proud father of a daughter and two sons and enjoys piercing satire, cruiser biking around Vancouver’s Spanish banks & English Bay, hiking/skiing, and with the help of his best friend Brandt, doggedly battling the aging process.
Little-known: Influenced by the simulated reality of the Matrix, an interesting fact about Clint is that he named his daughter “Trinity” and his 9 pound Yorkie –– “Neo” (not “Neil”).