Background

In 2005, Dan Cooper organized his consulting projects into "Cooper Ecological Monitoring, Inc." A birder since childhood, Cooper has spent fifteen years conducting research on birds throughout the U.S., mostly in California, but also in Malaysia and Latin America.

He received his academic training at Harvard University (AB 1995), and following college, worked as a biologist at the Kern River Preserve in eastern Kern County monitoring the response of nesting birds to riparian restoration. Around this time, he also began working with large landowners in Central and South America to inventory birds on their property, and to assess the ecotourism potential of their lands. This eventually led to projects working with coffee growers and buyers.

Cooper attended graduate school at the University of California, Riverside (MSc 1999), where he studied the effects of urbanization on the bird community of the Puente-Chino Hills in eastern Los Angeles County.

In 1999, Dan was hired by the National Audubon Society to join a team to design the Audubon Center at Debs Park (opened 2003), and then became Bird Conservation Director for Audubon California. In this capacity, he spent three years researching, writing and finally publishing "Important Bird Areas of California" (2004). This book identified 150 key locations for bird conservation throughout the state, and is helping set the course for Audubon's advocacy work in California. Cooper continues to do independent research on birds, and his work has been published in both scientific journals and popular magazines.