STARKVILLE, Miss. -- A Mississippi State University Extension professor of wildlife sciences has earned the top individual honor for excellence in Extension.

Daryl Jones has been named the recipient of the 2024 National Excellence in Extension Award for an Individual. The award is given annually by the Cooperative Extension System’s Extension Committee on Organization and Policy, or ECOP, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. Jones is the first recipient of the award from MSU.

Based in the MSU College of Forest Resources’ Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Jones has served since 2005 as director of the university’s Natural Resource Enterprises Program, which provides information to landowners on sustainable property enterprises, such as hunting, fishing, wildlife watching and agritourism. He conducts research and Extension programming for agricultural and forest landowners in natural resource enterprises development and conservation practices.

Jones has led 300 in-person wildlife recreational enterprise workshops with nearly 12,000 landowners having used what they learned to develop more than 2,500 enterprises across 28 states. Participants also conducted conservation practices on their lands, totaling 3.4 million acres.

He has also reached land managers online through webinars and other resources on the NRE website (naturalresources.msstate.edu), which has accrued more than 1 million users internationally.

Jones was chosen as a 2022 Fellow and 2013 Special Recognition Service Award recipient from The Wildlife Society and named the Wildlife Conservationist of the Year by the Mississippi Wildlife Federation in 2017. He has secured more than $5 million in grant funding from state and federal agencies and the private sector to support NRE programming.

“Dr. Jones is recognized as a national and international expert in natural resources development and conservation on private lands, and he also excels on campus as a mentor for other MSU Extension faculty and graduate students,” said MSU Extension Director Angus Catchot. “His contributions and leadership make him well-suited for this high honor.”

Jones will be presented the award at the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities in November.