06/03/2024
This month, Alex got to sit down with Colby Loucks from the 🐼 Colby Loucks joined WWF as an intern in 1996 and is now the Vice President and Deputy Lead for the Wildlife Program, and Director of WWF’s Wildlife Technology Innovation Lab, which focuses on identifying, piloting and scaling innovative technology solutions to conserve biodiversity & stop poaching.
Early in his WWF career, Colby led ecoregion conservation assessments for North America and the Indo-Pacific region and landscape and ecoregion planning analyses in the eastern Himalayas, Indochina, Mexico and China. Building on his expertise in GIS, conservation biology and landscape ecology – he identified critical unprotected giant panda habitat in China's Shaanxi Province. This work became the foundation for the Chinese government’s decision to more than double the region's protected areas to conserve giant pandas and biodiversity.
Colby has led or contributed to conservation efforts such as the Global 200, global impacts of protected areas on biodiversity and humans, impacts of war and peace to species loss in Cambodia, prioritizing tiger conservation areas, predicting the impact of sea level rise on tiger populations in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans, identification of critical migration corridors for pronghorn antelope in the USA’s Northern Great Plains, and the impact of forest certification on forest loss in Cameroon and Indonesia.
Make sure to check out this month's episode to learn more about Colby, World Wildlife Fund, and the importance of technology in saving wildlife (link in bio)!