Congratulations, David, the Alliance’s 2025 Fran Flanigan Award Winner!

The Alliance’s annual Taste celebration presents an opportunity for like-minded clean water advocates to gather and celebrate our beautiful watershed and all we have accomplished to protect it. Each year at the Taste, the Alliance recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the Chesapeake watershed through innovative thinking and developing impactful partnerships.

David Wise is the Watershed Restoration Manager for Stroud Water Research Center in Avondale, PA.
Most of Dave’s work focuses on projects and programs to provide farmers and other rural landowners with the technical and financial assistance for agricultural conservation practices and forested stream buffers in southeastern Pennsylvania. Dave enjoys working to improve methods for forested buffer restoration. He convenes and connects peers from across the mid-Atlantic to share questions and insights, and leads field research overlaid on buffer restoration projects to improve reforestation methods. Dave has degrees in natural resource management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MS) and Penn State’s College of Agriculture (BS), and lives in Lancaster County, PA. Hiking, fishing and wildflower gardening are some favorite activities. Dave is particularly fond of the portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Sullivan County, PA, including Word’s End State Park with its enthusiastic brook trout.

Join us as Alliance CEO, Kate Fritz, learns more about David’s work in Pennsylvania and with the Alliance.

Q: Can you talk about how you’ve collaborated with the Alliance?

A: The Alliance partnership [with Stroud] has been a delight and a joy, because there is truly shared vision, shared passion, and a deep trust on collegial cooperation. We share passion, priorities, and we also share a lot of technical insights – “in the trenches” insights about how to make funding work, what funders expect, and how to be savvy. Being able to share ideas and compare notes with the Alliance has been enormously beneficial.

 

Q: This award is named after the Alliance’s founding Executive Director, Fran Flanigan. One of things Fran did was spend a lot of time upstream in Pennsylvania. Could you talk about why that upstream work and riparian buffers are so critically important?

A: The vast majority of the stream miles in the Eastern US, whether it’s Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, or West Virginia, are streams that you can jump across or step across. They are, in essence, the capillary beds for our much larger waterways. It is where the vital exchanges of good stuff and the unfortunate exchanges of bad stuff are taking place. To be captivated by the larger streams is to miss where the efficient opportunities are to make differences in the downstream water quality and stream. It has been a continuing truism that if we fix things upstream, the downstream areas can take care of themselves much better.

 

Listen to the full interview below to learn more about David!

Get your Taste Tickets starting July 9th