Get to Know NWF’s 2025 Young Leader Award Winners

Skyler Nix and Isobel Lingenfelter received NWF’s 2025 National Conservation Achievement Young Leader Awards

By Delaney McPherson
NWF News
Sep 24, 2025

For the Birds:

Skyler Nix

Skyler Nix became interested in conservation as a 13-year-old volunteer at the Houston Zoo. By age 18, he had gone from zoo interpreter and camp counselor to lead naturalist on the zoo’s inaugural Teen Leadership Council. After he began studying ecology and conservation at Texas A&M University, the zoo’s conservation director referred him to an internship with Texas Conservation Alliance (TCA), a National Wildlife Federation affiliate, in 2022.

“TCA was a big leader in the statewide Lights Out campaign, targeting how light pollution affects migrating birds,” Nix, now 21, says. “On college campuses, there’s lots of glass, lights and immersive landscaping, making it a very deadly place for birds.”

Through his internship, Nix launched Lights Out, College Station!, an initiative raising awareness and tracking which campus buildings were seeing frequent bird strikes. During the next three years, he coordinated volunteer efforts documenting more than 500 bird casualties on campus. This spring, these efforts culminated in the university president committing to incorporating bird-friendly design into all future building plans.

Nix has also spent the past two summers participating in the Yale Conservation Scholars–Early Leadership Initiative. He plans to graduate in December and hopes eventually to work toward a master’s degree.

An image of Isobel Lingenfelter.

Love of the Land:

Isobel Lingenfelter

Isobel Lingenfelter’s passion for conservation comes from her childhood, growing up in Salt Lake City, surrounded by nature.

“You can just walk outside and look at the Wasatch Front and know you are looking at our public lands,” she says of the mountains to the east and north of the city. “It’s an unparalleled kind of access.”

After receiving a degree in urban ecology and planning from The University of Utah, she began working for the land conservation group Utah Diné Bikéyah. There, she supported the grassroots campaign to designate Bears Ears National Monument, organizing volunteers and press conferences.

When Lingenfelter, now 31, moved east in 2017 for her master’s degree in city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, she found herself watching old western movies to combat her homesickness. Once she completed her master’s, she moved back home to Utah and, in 2020, became the first full-time staff member of Utah Wildlife Federation, an NWF affiliate. As facilitator of the Utah Wildlife Connectivity Working Group, she helped secure $22 million from the state legislature to build wildlife crossings and to help prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions.

“People usually think of nature as something that exists ‘out there,’ but we live in and build our communities in nature,” Lingenfelter says. “There’s nowhere else to live and to be.”