Dan Schlager

Dan is our Wyoming State Director and leads The Conservation Fund’s efforts across the state. Dan brings uncommon perspectives to integrating conservation and economic objectives based upon his direct, extensive experiences problem-solving on land transactions from landowner, nonprofit and private investment perspectives.

Prior to joining the Fund in 2016, Dan founded and served as President of Conservation Solutions, a conservation-oriented private investment firm that worked across the Northern Rockies and in Hawaii, which he led and managed for 19 years. Conservation Solutions collaborated closely and cooperatively with landowners, utilized its private investment capital to make land investments and craft creative value-add conservation solutions to achieve double bottom-line objectives of land conservation and economic returns. In the 1990s, Dan directed and executed land conservation in Wyoming for the Jackson Hole Land Trust.

Dan has completed in excess of $250 million in land conservation transactions and has raised well over $100 million in private investment and public funds in helping to conserve more than 100,000 acres of critical lands across a wide variety of landscapes, including working ranches and forests, rivers and wetlands, national parks and public open spaces, scenic viewsheds and roadways, wildlife migration corridors and endangered species habitat, and historic battlefields and wagon trails. This breadth of varied experience helps inform Dan’s problem-solving approach in advancing conservation in a creative and economically responsible manner.

Dan holds an M.S. in Resource Conservation from the University of Montana School of Forestry, a J.D. from the Boston University School of Law, and a B.A. in Conflict Analysis and Communications from the University of Pennsylvania. Dan enjoys river and mountain adventures with family and friends, leaving a few footprints on beautiful landscapes, while cherishing the spiritual renewal, shared memories and unintended funny stories that time in nature creates.