A small firm with deep roots.

Charlotte Brett, Founder & Principal

Charlotte Brett founded Coppice Planning after twenty-five years in environmental work. She began in the field: waterfowl, wetland, and grassland surveys for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ecological research from the Sonoran Desert to the Dakota prairie, seasons on farms and in a plant nursery, wilderness immersion at Prescott College. Those years are why she speaks ecology comfortably with ecologists. A decade at a multi-state engineering firm followed, where she rose from environmental planner to the firm's first Environmental Practice Area Leader, building a new environmental practice into a 25-person group; that decade is why she speaks engineering with engineers. Her planning discipline ties the two together. Since 2017 she has built and led her own consulting practices in Buffalo; Coppice Planning brings all of it into a single, focused firm: land planning for communities, and restoration planning for the habitats those communities depend on.

Her work spans the full life of a project: developing concepts and securing agency approval, guiding clients through SEQR, NEPA, and state and federal permitting, authoring plans and permits, writing the grants that fund the work, and staying with projects through construction, monitoring, and adaptive management. The constant is integration: she talks with everyone a project touches, from clients and agencies to community members and the design team, then draws the threads together and turns them into direction the whole team can act on. She doesn't do the fieldwork or stamp the drawings; she's the person who understands everyone at the table, and makes sure they understand each other. And the relationships last: since 2019 as contracted Executive Director of New York Green, a Genesee County sustainability nonprofit; eight years directing a national investor's wetland mitigation program across New York State; more than $4 million in successful grants for a single municipal client. Clients tend to keep her, because programs, built patiently, outperform projects.

Charlotte holds an MPS in Environmental Science with a focus in Environmental & Community Land Planning from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where she graduated summa cum laude, and a BA in Environmental Studies from Prescott College. She has served on the Board of Governors of the New York State Wetlands Forum since 2010, currently as First Vice Chair, and co-authored Banking on Change: Rethinking Wetland Mitigation in the State of New York, Ecosystem Marketplace's Top Read Story of the Year.

What the name promises

A coppice is one of the oldest practices in woodland management: a tree cut back to its stool answers with a dozen new shoots, regrowing denser and more resilient than what stood before. We named the firm for that idea because it's what good planning and good restoration both do: they work with a landscape's own capacity to renew itself, and they leave places more alive than they found them.

A coppice is also a place: the grove itself, a wood that renews for generations because of the care it was given. That's the promise in our name: modest in scale, long in patience, and focused on leaving behind not just a plan or a planting, but a place with its own capacity to renew.

The firm

Coppice Planning, LLC is a woman-owned New York firm based in the Buffalo area, serving municipalities, nonprofits, land trusts, agencies, landowners, and project teams across New York State and beyond.

The firm is small on purpose. Every engagement is led personally by Charlotte, and each project team is assembled to fit the work: trusted planners, landscape architects, engagement specialists, ecologists, and engineers she has worked with for years. Clients get one accountable person who knows their project completely, backed by exactly the expertise it needs.

• Home base — Buffalo, New York
• Structure — New York LLC, woman-owned
• Experience — 25 years across environmental planning, permitting & restoration
• Education — MPS, SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry · BA, Prescott College
• Affiliations — NYS Wetlands Forum, Board of Governors (2010–present) · Treasurer (2014–2026) · First Vice Chair (2026–present)
• Service area — New York State and beyond