Current GBBO Staff

Elisabeth Ammon, Phd
Elisabeth Ammon has served as the Executive Director of GBBO since 2005. She earned a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, with a project on the breeding ecology of montane riparian songbirds in Colorado. Her career has covered habitat restoration planning for riparian birds, monitoring of landbirds including the development of a statewide landbird monitoring program for Nevada, and a wide variety of conservation planning efforts. Her interests today lie primarily in collaborative efforts toward bird conservation and monitoring.

Jennifer Ballard, M.S.
Jen has been the Monitoring Coordinator at GBBO since 2004. She is in charge of GBBO's largest program, the Nevada Bird Count, as well as all ancillary monitoring efforts that support the statewide monitoring of birds in Nevada. Her interests lie in conservation research and planning.

John Boone, Ph.D.
John grew up in North Carolina, attended college at George Washington University, received his MS degree at Idaho State University, and his PhD degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder. John’s graduate and postdoctoral work focused on mammals, but eventually he saw the light and began working with Great Basin Bird Observatory in 2005 on the Nevada Breeding Bird Atlas Project. Since then, John has been involved with radiotelemetry studies of Pinyon Jays and Greater Sage-Grouse and the ongoing revision of the Nevada Bird Conservation Plan. In March, he will be heading up a new GBBO project to improve methods of monitoring Elf Owls along the Lower Colorado River.

Chai Cook
Chai has been GBBO's Grants and Office Manager since 2008. She handles all contracting and books of GBBO, and her interests include international education and outdoor activities.

Amy Leist, M.S.
Amy is GBBO's Project Biologist, who has been in charge of the Lower Colorado River Riparian Bird Monitoring project since 2008. Her interests, aside from southwestern riparian birds, include environmental education, bird banding, and outdoors activities. Amy grew up in Louisville, KY, then moved west to attend college at Colorado College. After graduating with an MA in Biology, she worked on field jobs in Washington, Hawaii, Alaska, California, and Chile, before heading back to school. She received an MS from Humboldt State University in Wildlife, and continued to roam the country studying birds until moving to Reno in 2007. Amy is currently a project biologist with GBBO and manages the Lower Colorado River Riparian Bird Monitoring project.

Jock Young, M.S.
Jock has joined GBBO in 2009 as our Wildlife Statistician and Research Biologist, after 13 years at the University of Montana Avian Science Center. His interests include bird-habitat relationships and monitoring that assist in conservation planning, as well as Decision Support Tool development and conservation design.