Jeffrey A. Lerner

Director of Conservation Planning


Areas of Expertise: State wildlife plans, wildlife policy, conservation and land use planning, habitat loss and sprawl, green infrastructure, public lands planning, conservation funding

Jeff Lerner is Director of Conservation Planning at Defenders of Wildlife. Defenders’ conservation program takes a proactive and strategic approach toward wildlife conservation, focusing on habitat in ways that reduce conflict and make creative use of various conservation tools. Jeff’s responsibilities include promoting state and regional conservation plans and their implementation, the relationship between land use planning and conservation planning, and linking habitat protection to smart growth planning. Jeff also supports Defenders’ conservation activities on public lands and analyzes conservation funding.

Jeff is an expert on the new state comprehensive wildlife conservation plans (also known as state wildlife action plans). Defenders is largely responsible for creating the federal program that initiated these plans and our planning program is now heavily invested in seeing these plans become a needed complement to the Endangered Species Act, guiding additional habitat protection investments and targeting private landowner incentives to places consistent with conservation plans. Jeff conceived of and led Defenders’ effort to review all of the State Wildlife Action Plans, which resulted in the publication, Conservation Across the Landscape: A Review of the State Wildlife Action Plans. Jeff and his team now engage in different projects aimed at improving the wildlife plans and assisting with their implementation.

Before joining Defenders in 2000, Jeff worked in the Conservation Science Division of The Nature Conservancy, aggregating and analyzing biodiversity information gathered from natural heritage programs across the U.S.  He also spent numerous field seasons studying birds of prey in the western U.S. and has experience working in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, Pacific Northwest and Southern California.

Jeff Lerner holds a M.S. in Conservation Biology from the University of Maryland, and a B.A. in Zoology from Ohio Wesleyan University. He is a native of New England.

Contact Information
Phone: (202) 682-9400
Email: jeff.lerner@defenders.org