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In joyful memory of Dr Mark R Stanley Price (1947-2022)

We record, with great pride, the invaluable contribution to wildlife conservation, to our Unit, and to our community of friends, of Dr Mark Stanley Price. Mark joined the WildCRU in 2008, and for these 14 years has been at the professional and social centre of our community. His arrival with us was a return migration to Oxford, where he had graduated in Zoology in 1969, and completed a doctorate in 1974 on The feeding ecology of Coke’s hartebeest in Kenya. During these doctoral days Mark shared a house with WildCRU’s founder, David Macdonald, so his years in WildCRU bookended a lifelong friendship. In the meantime his fame had grown from the pioneering reintroduction of the Arabian oryx in Oman (1979-87), to a Director of the African Wildlife Foundation in Nairobi (1987-1999), and then to Chief Executive of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey (2001-2008). Since joining WildCRU, Mark’s focus was increasingly on the IUCN. Between 2010-2012 he was Chair of the Reintroduction and Invasive Species Specialist Group’s Task Force on Moving Plants and Animals for Conservation Purposes, and between 2010-2016 he was Chair of the SSC Species Conservation Planning Sub-Committee. Previously, as founder-Chair (1988-2000) of the IUCN SSC Reintroduction Specialist Group, he had led that group to publish the 1998 Guidelines for Reintroduction – a primer in the field, that was translated into seven languages and has been used all over the world. As knowledge accumulated, Mark chaired a task force from the Reintroduction and Invasive Species Specialist Groups to produce the 2013 Guidelines for Reintroductions and Other Conservation Translocations, nowadays available in eight languages. The culmination of this journey was his leadership of the development for the SSC of new Guidelines for Species Conservation Planning, published in 2017. These achievements earned a string of accolades: Order of Oman (1987), Order of the Golden Ark, Netherlands (1988), IUCN SSC Peter Scott Award for Conservation Merit (2015), Honorary Conservation Fellow, Zoological Society of London (2016), ZSL Award for Conservation Innovation (2018), Lifetime Contribution Award for advancing the science and practice of conservation translocations (2018). Mark’s generosity of spirit, which benefited generations of  graduate students in WildCRU and beyond, including especially the WildCRU ‘Panthers’, was reflected in the diversity and diligence of his voluntary work. Between 2010-2016 he was a member of the SSC Steering Committee, and since 2008 he has been a Board member of Marwell Zoo (latterly Vice-Chair), since 2013 on the Board of the Sahara Conservation Fund, since 2015 Chair of the Friends of Kenya Wildlife Trust (UK), since 2017 Board member of the World Land Trust, and, also since 2017, Special Adviser to the Species Survival Commission. In 2019 he joined the Board of Lion Landscapes. We celebrate these and a myriad other professional achievements and, no less, the generous spirit, curving smile and gentle laugh that so often prefaced sage interjections that began “Well, now, ….” and ended with the listener left wiser.

David Macdonald

18/12/22