Jackie Corday, owner of Corday Natural Resources Consulting, is a land and water conservation lawyer with over two decades of strategically collaborating with numerous local, state, and federal agencies and nonprofits to solve challenges to natural resource issues with a focus on stream and watershed health. She works at the intersection of science, policy, and law, with a particular interest in synthesizing the latest science research to help inform policy.

Jackie served as the City of Missoula’s Open Space Program Manager from 2004 to 2013, in charge of acquiring conservation lands, parks, and trails via easements or fee title, and it was in this capacity that she was honored in 2011 with the Burk/Brandborg Award.

In a presentation before the Missoula City Council, Tim Aldrich said that Jackie’s work for open space conservation “helped shape the physical and cultural futures of Missoula and facilitated numerous benefits for the City’s residents and those who visit here. Through her vision, drive, perseverance, patience and exceptional communication abilities she is the apparently tireless leader of this very successful program, relying on bond funding approved by the voters of Missoula, not once but twice. She’s the legs under this program, an accomplished mentor and motivator, always conscious of the need to address the public’s priorities.”

In 2013, Jackie moved to Denver to join Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s Real Estate Section to assist the agency in acquiring conservation lands and parks all across the state. In 2016, she became head of CPW’s Water Resources Section in Denver, leading a team of scientists, water engineers, and attorneys in managing one of the state’s largest water right portfolios for parks and wildlife refuges.

She moved to Montrose in early 2020 to begin a natural resources consulting company with her main clients being American Rivers and Audubon. In 2020, she established and co-chairs the Colorado Healthy Headwaters Working Group, a statewide collective of stream restoration experts, scientists, agency, academic, and nonprofit staff who are working together to amplify headwater restoration in Colorado–and to build and maintain connections with efforts in Montana and throughout the West.

She also established and co-chairs with American Rivers the Riverscape Restoration Network, which now has over 200 members from all the Western States, including 25 from Montana. The main purpose of the RRN is to help provide information and support to scaling up process-based restoration of streams/wetlands to improve habitat and resilience to drought, flooding, and wildfires.

Biography by Sarah Bates