Photo: JoAnna and her husband, Leon, visit the Auburn Pumpkin Festival.
Yuba Water Agency Project Manager JoAnna Lessard leads and supports programs and projects that benefit the agency's mission areas, including water supply reliability, natural resource management, watershed resilience and forest health and more. With an extensive background in aquatic research and studies, she made the decision to switch her career focus from the stream to the watershed after experiencing California's 2014 drought, so that she could support water management and help solve conservation issues. Scroll to read more about JoAnna.
What do you do for Yuba Water?
I wear a lot of hats at Yuba Water, but you could boil it down to developing projects that help solve problems and then figuring out how to pay for them. I lead the agency's Watershed Resilience Program to develop large-scale and collaborative forest health and fire risk reduction projects. I also lead the Yuba Integrated Regional Water Management Program, which develops a wide variety of projects focused on water and other natural resource management issues. Within our water resources team, I support the Groundwater Management Program with outreach and other important water-supply focused projects. Across all of these programs and projects, I also work to strategize opportunities for external and collaborative funding for high priority projects.
What does your average day look like? What are some of your essential duties?
I joined Yuba Water during COVID-19 restrictions, so I currently spend most of every day either in a zoom meeting or preparing for a zoom meeting. Due to their collaborative nature, impactful discussion and regular engagement are of paramount importance to all of the projects and programs that I support. Keeping those connections, even remotely, has been a priority. In between these committee, team, project and stakeholder meetings, I also keep track of the progress of several projects and complete any necessary grant-related reporting. Our Watershed Resilience Program is very ambitious, especially with our involvement in the North Yuba Forest Partnership, so I also spend quite a lot of time giving invited talks about our program, which is important to help grow understanding and to encourage others to get engaged in these efforts.
Photo: JoAnna and her husband pause for a photo while hiking in New Zealand.
What is your background and formal education that led to where you are in your career today?
Most of my career has been focused on aquatic research and conducting studies to determine how water management decisions impact aquatic habitat and communities. I have a bachelor's degree in fisheries and wildlife management, a master's degree in fisheries biology and a doctorate in aquatic entomology.
I have conducted research and consulted on aquatic resource management in Michigan, Florida, Maryland, Alaska, California and New Zealand’s South Island. I came back to California from New Zealand during the 2014 drought and made the decision to switch my career focus from the stream to the watershed and to focus more on public engagement and environmental literacy to support water management and conservation issues. It became clear to me that the best way to have a beneficial impact on suffering aquatic communities was to help humans better understand and use water.
That shift in focus coincided with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and Yuba Water becoming one of the first Groundwater Sustainability Agencies in the state. I was first contracted to support public engagement on that topic and my work with the agency has since snowballed from there.
How did you get involved in your current career path?
I think I was always going to be involved in some sort of science. In school, it just made sense to me. I grew up in Michigan and most vacations and holidays were spent on my grandparent’s farm in northern Michigan, which by the time I was born was 180 acres of meadows, pine forest, undeveloped lakefront, wetlands and creeks.
My dad had a long career with the Cooperative Extension Service at Michigan State University, so 4-H clubs, camps and associated outings were common experiences for my family. When I was 13, my mother, who also worked at MSU, helped organize what was called the “Natural Resources Camp” which was a week-long camp fully staffed by professors and researchers from the MSU Fisheries and Wildlife Department. She made me go and I loved it.
After two years as a camper and one year as a counselor at Natural Resources Camp, I started working at MSU in the summers and helping graduate students with their research. By the time I started at MSU as a freshman in that same department, I had already worked there for three years. All of that early exposure helped build my confidence and interest in aquatic science, which combined with my instinct to never say no to any opportunity, helped lead me to this career.
Do you have any advice for students interested in a career in science, technology, engineering and mathematics?
I would tell anyone interested in a science career to look for internships and work experience. There is nothing more useful to selecting a career path than real experience and it will build your arsenal of personal and professional contacts. Also travel, go to other places and be open to the different ways that others solve the same problems we experience.
What do you enjoy most about working for Yuba Water?
I enjoy the collaborative and impactful programs that Yuba Water has developed and allowed me to participate in. Our teams are full of passionate and talented people that are also just really nice. The work we are doing is important, not just for the agency, but for the people of Yuba County, our natural resources and the entire state. It’s a lot of fun to do good work with good people.
Photo: JoAnna and her husband snap a photo with Lake Tahoe in the background while hiking a segment of the Tahoe Rim Trail.
Before working at Yuba Water, what was the most interesting job you had?
I have had a lot of different science jobs, but one really odd one was during my sophomore year at Michigan State, when I worked for a graduate student from Japan who was studying African elephant nutrition in Kenya. I spent many hours chemically digesting dried elephant dung in the windowless labs of the Fisheries and Wildlife Department to try to ascertain the variation in nutritional benefits of the plants they were most commonly eating. It was the only time I wore a lab coat every day.
Tell us something about yourself that most of us don’t know.
I met my husband in New Zealand where we were both expats. He had come over from England the year before and moved to my city, Christchurch, to help in the rebuild after a series of devastating earthquakes destroyed large areas. The experience of living through the earthquakes and aftershocks and the long period of rebuilding everything, both in and above ground, was a real experience. There were over 10,000 aftershocks in the two years after the first large quake, and we felt nearly all of them.
What do you like to do in your free time?
We bought 12 acres of raw land in south Nevada County when we moved to California in 2014, so we have spent the last six years developing the land and building our home. It is a 100 percent self-build project (design, planning, water, power, septic, construction—everything), so working as an unskilled laborer in various building trades takes most of my free time.
When not building, we like to hike the mountain trails. So far, the Tahoe Rim Trail segments are our favorites. We have also accumulated two dogs, five sheep and three chickens, so I spend a lot of time trying to make sure all of them are happy, safe and achieving all their personal goals. I also enjoy cooking and live theatre in any form.
