Mace Vaughan

Mace Vaughan serves as the Xerces Society’s Pollinator and Ag Biodiversity Conservation Program Co-Director, and as a Conservation Entomologist and Partner Biologist to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS) West National Technology Support Center in Portland, Oregon. Mace has led Xerces’ Pollinator Conservation Program since 2003 and has acted as a Partner Biologist to the NRCS since 2008. In his tenure at the Xerces Society, the pollinator program has grown from a small pilot project on California farms to a national program implementing pollinator conservation projects across the U.S. Mace co-leads a team of 25 pollinator conservation specialists and several consultants across the U.S., and now helps to supervise the world’s largest pollinator conservation team.

His work with other staff at the Xerces Society and the USDA-NRCS has led to the implementation of hundreds of thousands of acres of pollinator and beneficial insect habitats on farms throughout the U.S. Through education and outreach events, he has directly reached thousands of agency staff, farmers, land managers, and homeowners. Mace also has expertise in working to reduce the impact of pesticides on pollinators and was invited to serve on the steering committee for an international meeting of regulators, scientists, and industry to develop improved risk assessment strategies to better protect pollinators.

Mace has written numerous articles on the conservation of bees, butterflies, aquatic invertebrates, and insects, and is co-author of the publications Attracting Native Pollinators: Protecting North America’s Bees and Butterflies, Farming with Native Beneficial Insects, and the Pollinator Conservation Handbook. He is the lead author of Farming for Bees: Guidelines for Providing Native Bee Habitat on Farms. He was a lecturer on honey bee biology and beekeeping at Cornell University, from which he holds degrees in entomology, teaching, and natural resources management. Mace has conducted research into the behavior of honey bees and the community ecology of insects and has worked as an insect wrangler and bee expert for PBS Nature.