Chelsea Neill

Chelsea Neill is a principal geomorphologist who leads Balance’s Geosciences group and manages the firm’s Santa Cruz office. She specializes in fluvial and coastal systems with expertise in habitat enhancement, fish passage assessment and design, stream restoration, sediment transport, and planning and monitoring. She is skilled in project management and has successfully overseen large-scale interdisciplinary teams on projects addressing fish passage, ecological restoration, watershed assessments, and groundwater-surface water interactions. Chelsea excels at coordinating complex efforts, balancing technical rigor with stakeholder engagement to develop science-based, climate-resilient solutions. She has extensive experience in collecting and analyzing topographic, bathymetric, and hydrologic data—including water quality and sediment samples—and she conducts hydrologic modeling analysis as well as spatial and temporal analysis and remote-sensing through GIS platforms.