David Wilkie Email and Phone Number

He is a wildlife ecologist with a post-doctoral anthropology specialization in human behavioral ecology, and has spent the last 30 years trying to understand the socio-economic and institutional factors driving the conservation or unsustainable use of natural resources by rural families in central and west Africa, and in central and south America. His research in the Congo Basin started in 1981 and has focused on forager and farming subsistence practices and the impact of these practices on tropical forest resources. Other research interests include examining the impacts of trade and the commercialization of non-timber forest products on forest conservation; the role that logging plays in the commercial bushmeat trade; the role that income, prices, and taste preferences play in determining demand for bushmeat; the use of direct payments as a tool for biodiversity conservation in developing countries; and the use of satellite imagery, aerial photography, and spatial simulations to model present and future tropical forest loss. He has published more than 130 peer reviewed articles and books.He has been co-chair of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force and is co-director of the Ituri Forest Peoples Fund, a special project of Cultural Survival. He helped establish the Conservation Measures Partnership – a joint venture of conservation NGOs committed to improving the practice of conservation by promoting adoption of a consensus-based set of standards for planning, implementation and measuring conservation impact. At WCS he is responsible for the development, testing and dissemination of project strategic planning, monitoring and adaptive management tools, and for helping develop and document best practices for integrating biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation and equitable governance of natural resources. He is chief of party of the USAID TransLinks and SCAPES LWAs to WCS.