Eric Dinerstein

Eric Dinerstein, WWF's chief scientist and vice president for science, started his career as a wildlife biologist studying tigers and their prey in Nepal's Bardia National Park in 1975. He has been interested in the conservation of large Asian mammals ever since. As a post-doctoral fellow with the National Zoo, he studied the biology of the greater one-horned rhinoceros in Nepal, the results of which are published in a number of scientific papers, popular articles, and the monograph, The Return of the Unicorns: The Natural History and Conservation of the Greater One-Horned Rhinoceros (Columbia University Press). Building on his work on rhinos and tigers, Eric helped conceive the idea of the Terai Arc Landscape, one of the most amibtious wildlife recovery projects in Asia that seeks to reconnect 12 parks and reserves across southern Nepal and northern India to manage the tigers found there as a single population. More recently, Eric is one of the key contributors to a new report on Tiger Conservation Landscapes (TCLs) entitled Setting Priorities for Conservation and Recovery of Wild Tigers: 2005-2015. He is also helping design new approaches to create incentives for local people to become local guardians of wildlife in tiger landscapes. Eric is coauthor of several books on biodiversity and conservation priorities in Latin America and the Caribbean, Russia, Asia, and Africa. His latest book, Tigerland and Other Unintended Destinations, takes readers on a dynamic journey to conservation's frontiers. He is also a co-architect of the Global 200 ecoregions, an analysis to identify the most biologically important ecoregions in the terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms. Adopted as the centerpiece of WWF's Living Planet Campaign, the Global 200 provides the blueprint for WWF's conservation work worldwide. Eric's diverse research has ranged from collaborating on a study of animals reliant on old-growth habitat in the Pacific Northwest to establishing a field research program on snow leopards in northern India and conducting a four-year field study of greater one-horned rhinoceros. For his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biology from the University of Washington, he studied the prey species of tigers in Nepal and the ecology of fruit bats in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica.

Sybille Klenzendorf

Sybille Klenzendorf is director of WWF's Species Conservation Program and a key contributor to a new study on Tiger Conservation Landscapes (TCLs) entitled Setting Priorities for Conservation and Recovery of Wild Tigers: 2005-2015. Previously she directed all tiger-related programs in Asia. Her work includes technical advisor for field projects, writing proposals and reports, media relations, and interagency communications. Before joining WWF in 2002, she was a field biologist for the Virginia Fish and Game Department, studying Alleghany black bears. She also worked for a team in Europe to design an Austrian brown bear management plan, which earned her an M.S. degree. A native German, Sybille came to the United States in 1994 and has continued to work internationally finding solutions for wildlife-human conflicts. Her work has led her to Alaska, Norway, Italy, Romania, Austria, Slovenia, and Pakistan. Sybille received her Ph.D. in wildlife science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Colby Loucks (center) in Eastern Cambodia analyzing land cover change in the dry forests - home of the Indochinese Tiger.

Colby Loucks, a senior conservation specialist in WWF's Conservation Science Program, has used his background in landscape ecology and geographic information systems (GIS) to assist field programs and decision-makers in developing conservation plans that span a wide range of scales. He was integral to regional conservation assessments of both North America and the Indo-Pacific; coordinated and facilitated ecoregion planning workshops in the eastern Himalayas, Indochina, and China's southwest temperate forests; and worked at local-landscape scales, notably using his expertise in GIS and remote sensing to identify critical gaps in the Qinling Mountains protected area system for giant pandas. His work formed the scientific foundation which eventually led to the establishment of seven protected areas and five corridors by the Shaanxi provincial government specifically for giant panda conservation. More recently, Colby has applied his knowledge of landscape ecology, GIS, and conservation biology to conserving tigers in the wild. He directed WWF's collaboration with WCS and the Smithsonian to develop the most comprehensive study of tigers and their habitat across their range to identify tiger priority landscapes (TCLs) - areas where tigers still thrive. He is a key contributor on a report detailing the findings of this study, entitled Setting Priorities for Conservation and Recovery of Wild Tigers: 2005-2015. Colby received his B.S. in Biology from the College of William and Mary in 1994, and Master's of Environmental Management from Duke University in 1996. His graduate work combined his interests in landscape ecology, forest ecology, and conservation biology to establish a baseline of forest species diversity for sustainable forestry operations in Paraguay.

Eric Wikramanayake

Eric Wikramanayake, senior conservation scientist with the Conservation Science Program, provides technical assistance to WWF's Asia ecoregion and species programs. He has been integral in conservation planning throughout Asia across a variety of scales. Eric is the lead author of a conservation assessment on the Indo-Pacific, gap analysis and biological vision of the Himalayas, and was one of the lead investigators of the seminal range-wide tiger conservation assessment - Tiger Conservation Units - published in 1997. He is also the scientific advisor to the Terai Arc Landscape program that strives to link 11 protected areas along a 600 km span across southern Nepal and northwestern India to create a tiger conservation landscape. Prior to joining the Conservation Science Program, Eric worked for ten years as a consultant for WWF Bhutan Program and WWF Indochina, where he did extensive field work and conservation planning in Bhutan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He was a member of a team of biologists that discovered a new species of deer in the Annamite Mountains along the border between Vietnam and Laos. Eric received his Ph. D. from University of California, Davis in 1988 on the ecological structure and conservation of fish assemblages in tropical wet-zone streams of Sri Lanka.