2009 Honorees
In 2009, Dr. Amanda Dey and Jane Morton Galetto were awarded for their work, the advances they have made for women in their professions and the contributions they have made to New Jersey’s wildlife. Awards are made for Leadership and Inspiration.
Jane Morton Galetto
Inspiration Award
Jane is the founder and President of Citizens United to Protect the Maurice River and Its Tributaries (CU). She was instrumental in the designation of the Maurice, Manumuskin, Menantico, and Muskee Rivers as part of the National Wild and Scenic River System. As president of CU, Jane oversees the organization and promoted its activities. She also organizes volunteers in construction of habitat projects, arranges meetings with various land trusts and local property owners on land acquisition projects, conducts river tours to interested parties, assists in the organization of festivals and gives conservation presentations to school and civic groups and coordinates various studies performed by experts in flora and fauna. She is a major contributor to Citizen United’s extensive website.
Zoom+ Jane received the Inspriation award in 2009 for her work to protect NJ's wildlife. Image courtesy of Jane Galetto
In the mid 80’s Jane and her husband Peter, along with Eddie DiPalma, were the originators of the Maurice River Osprey Colony Project. CU’s volunteers have been responsible for providing nests for more than a quarter of the state’s osprey population. Since 2006 the Maurice River has produced in excess of 60 fledglings a year.
In addition to local efforts, she chaired the New Jersey Endangered and Nongame Species Advisory Committee (ENSAC) for 18 years and was a Fish and Game Councilwoman for that same period. She still serves as an ENSAC member. Jane played an integral role in the passage of New Jersey’s 1987 Wetlands Law while serving on NJ Freshwater Wetlands Advisory Committee. She sits on the boards of New Jersey Audubon Society, Bayshore Discovery Project, and The Nature Conservancy Bayshores Program. Citizens United is one of the founding members of the South Jersey Bayshore Coalition to which Jane is a representative. Jane has co-produced five NJN documentaries which highlight the wonders of Southern NJ. She and Louis Presti won an Emmy for Reflections of a Bayshore Painter - a documentary on artist Glenn Rudderow. Jane is also a board member on the Galetto Family Foundation, a philanthropic group that supports local non-profit entities with an emphasis on health, education and the environment.
Amanda Dey
Leadership Award
Zoom+ Mandy has worked on a variety of projects involving shorebirds, goldenwing warblers, and statewide surveys of grassland and forest passerines. Image courtesy of Amanda Dey
Amanda (Mandy) Dey is Principal Zoologist with the Endangered and Nongame Species Program in New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife. She has worked for the Endangered and Nongame Species Program since 1993 working on a variety of projects involving shorebirds, goldenwing warblers, power line rights of way, and statewide surveys of grassland and forest passerines. Before the Endangered and Nongame Species Program she worked for Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Hubert Brook Experimental Forest. One of the most remarkable aspects of Mandy’s early career is that she started as a secretary; a job many people find has few opportunities to advance. Rather than being discouraged by her future opportunities, she went back to college and majored in ecology because of her passion for wildlife. She did not stop there but went on to receive her Ph.d. from Rutgers University with her thesis on breeding passerines(songbirds). Her thesis was recently published as a book with Springer Verlag.
Mandy has contributed enormously in many areas of wildlife conservation, but her landscape studies with neotropical migrants and her work with shorebirds are particularly deserving of mention. While the plight of neotropical migrants has been known for some time, few studies examined the problem from a landscape scale. Following several years of intense fieldwork and statistical and modeling analysis, a predictive model of forest songbird distribution relative to forest size and configuration was developed. This led to mapping important songbird habitat in the state. This project has been extremely important in management of habitats for the protection of neotropical migrants in New Jersey. Her work with shorebirds is exemplary. Shorebirds are another group of migrants in trouble due to habitat loss and food shortages, in the latter case because of overharvesting of horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay. This work has been a passion of Mandy’s for many years, and she has been a guiding light in the field. Her contributions to this species group include such activities as overseeing the Delaware Bay Shorebird Management Plan; co-leading development of an internet-based reporting system for marked shorebirds; conducting critical landscape scale mapping; implementing a hemisphere-wide monitoring program for migratory shorebirds; developing best-management practices for protecting shorebirds, and; conducting and managing critical field work on shorebirds, particularly the Red Knot in New Jersey, northern Canada and on their wintering ground in southern South America.
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