Alex Smith | Equinox Environmental

Recreation and Environmental Planner

Alex is a Recreation Planner at Equinox and has a background in Urban and Regional Planning, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Environmental Studies. Alex provides creative solutions to Equinox’s environmental, land use, urban planning, and recreational projects. He is also Equinox’s GIS specialist. Alex has experience with the land trust community and has served as a land protection, stewardship, and GIS specialist. Alex joins Equinox after working for the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to uphold the conservation values of Virginia’s most unique landscapes. His prior experience also includes work on a local route of the East Coast Greenway for which he provided branding, GIS landscape analysis, planning, permitting, and stakeholder engagement. While working with the East Cooper Land Trust in Mount Pleasant, SC, Alex independently developed a regional natural asset plan based on GIS mapping and research that focused on landscape assessment, conservation planning for wildlife corridors, natural resource and habitat protection, greenway routing, and active and passive outdoor recreation.

Why I Love This Work

This work has allowed me to finally be creative with the coalescence of conservation and recreation planning while applying it to diverse projects that I hope help both people and nature.

Education

Master of Science in Environmental Studies; The College of Charleston

Graduate Degree in Urban & Regional Planning; The College of Charleston

Bachelor of Science in Environmental Science; Virginia Tech

Skills

Open space planning, trail & recreation planning, urban planning, conservation easements, land trust baseline documentation, land use monitoring & stewardship, land deed research, landowner outreach, cartography, data management, grant proposal writing & grant award management, ESRI’s ArcGIS, online GIS web applications including ArcGIS Story Maps, Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office

Favorite Species

The Bombus, which is the genus of the many bumblebee species. As skilled pollinators of food crops, they are one of the most important animals on earth, yet they currently face a worldwide decline. For a large part of human history, they were misconceived to be incapable of flight based on many scientists’ calculations – yet that never stopped them from getting their pollinator duties accomplished!