Wren Castellano

Reopened 2.4 km of abandoned side channel on a working ranch reach, negotiated across four adjacent landowners and a seasonal irrigation withdrawal.

• Built the funding stack from three restoration grants and one habitat-mitigation agreement, then carried it through a single consolidated permit review.
• Reworked the design mid-permitting after spring survey showed the historic alignment had migrated, saving the construction window.
• Left the conservancy a five-year monitoring protocol their seasonal crew can run without a consultant.

• Channel design
• Permitting
• Landowner agreements
• Grant assembly

Program lead for a voluntary relocation and levee-setback scheme on a repeatedly flooded urban fringe, delivered alongside a neighbourhood advisory group that met monthly for two years.

• Translated hydraulic modelling into plain-language flood scenarios that residents used to compare relocation options themselves.
• Coordinated demolition, soil remediation and planting sequencing so the reclaimed floodplain was walkable within one season.
• Wrote the district's first internal standard for post-project public reporting.

• Floodplain planning
• Hydraulic modelling
• Public engagement
• Program delivery

Prioritised and replaced eleven undersized crossings on a single tributary network, sequenced so each construction season opened continuous upstream habitat rather than isolated fragments.

• Developed the scoring model that ranked crossings by passage gain, failure risk and road criticality; the county still uses it.
• Standardised three crossing templates, cutting design time on later sites to a fraction of the first.

• Fish passage
• Prioritisation modelling
• Capital sequencing

• Direct a portfolio of restoration projects across three sub-basins, from concept scoping to construction close-out and monitoring handover.
• Line-manage four project managers and a seasonal field crew; set the technical review standard all designs pass through.
• Own the program funding calendar and the partner agreements that underpin it.

• Led floodplain and flood-risk planning for the lower district, including the Millrace setback program.
• Introduced a standing community advisory process that is now used on every capital water project the district runs.

• Ran geomorphic assessments, sediment budgets and reach-scale design for public and private clients.
• Produced the expert reporting behind several contested permit reviews.

• Maintained gauging stations and cross-section surveys across a seventy-kilometre monitoring network.

Thesis on sediment response following large-wood reintroduction in low-gradient reaches.