Crissy Sutter

Director of Ecological Services, Bat Team Lead

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Crissy Sutter is a senior ecologist with 17 years of experience in wildlife ecology, land management, and bird and bat interactions with wind energy. Crissy holds an MS degree in Life Sciences/Ecology from Indiana State University. She holds a Certificate in GIS from Pennsylvania State University (MS expected in 2010) and is proficient in ArcGIS (ArcView, ArcInfo, and Spatial Analyst). Like her educational background, Crissy's work experience is multidisciplinary and comprehensive.

Birds, Bats, and Wind Energy

Crissy has directed, managed, and conducted numerous electric utility and wind energy projects at Pandion. She is an active member of the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative Wildlife Workgroup and Risk Assessment Subgroup. She is currently managing preconstruction bat acoustic monitoring at sites across the U.S. and Canada for one of the largest wind developers in North America. She also played a key role in designing the monitoring systems.

For the Chautauqua Wind Energy Project, Crissy co-developed the first quantitative avian risk assessment model that estimated the birds at risk and/or potentially killed by wind turbines. She co-wrote a statewide Avian Protection Plan and risk assessment for Florida Power and Light on the effects of electric utility structures on four endangered birds in Florida. As a bat biologist, she wrote a white paper about bat interactions with wind turbines and performed spatial risk analyses for endangered bats on over 300,000 acres of proposed wind farms in Texas.

Land Management, GIS, and Ecology

Crissy's land management experience includes managing and conducting vegetative and wildlife inventories and assessments, writing land management plans, and providing expertise in land management and invasive exotic plant control for public and private lands at the local, state, and federal levels.

Crissy has practical experience in the field and at the policy level with developing, implementing, and managing large projects (up to 100,000 acres). She has more than nine years of experience in spatial representation and analysis of natural resources using GIS. She also has more than four years of experience in developing models that use mathematical equations to simulate and predict real events and processes.

Prior to joining Pandion, Crissy was an ecologist and land manager for the Suwannee River Water Management District for five years and was the field zoologist for the Mississippi Natural Heritage Program for four years.

When Not at Work

Crissy’s other interests include a wealth of nature-based activities, from camping and kayaking to bird watching and plant photography. She shares this enthusiasm with her young family through native plant gardening, nature hikes, and at-home science experiments that range from building volcanoes to raising butterflies and worm-farming.