Team
Graham Wesolowski, MESM
Executive 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.
Dr. Marc Mayes, PhD
Regional Wildfire Mitigation Program - Landscape Domain Lead
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).
Amy Mathews
Operations Manager
Amy Mathews is originally from Georgia but was raised in Tallahassee, Florida, where her love and appreciation for the outdoors and wildlife began. Amy completed all of her education in Tallahassee including graduating from Florida State University in 2012 with a major in Psychology and a minor in Hospitality. While attending FSU, she had the opportunity to study abroad in Florence, Italy allowing her the ability to explore that country, along with Spain, and the Netherlands. In her professional career, she has worked in Marketing, Social Work, and as the Development Coordinator for another environmental non-profit. In her free time, Amy likes to travel, spend time with her dog, enjoy a good meal with friends, and do anything in the sunshine.