Rivington R. Winant Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Wildlife Conservation

I am a post-doctoral researcher with a wide range of interests in conservation biology. The main focus of my current work is split between the emerging field of conservation marketing and spatial conservation planning.

Conservation marketing and local attitudes towards conservation
Marketing campaigns are an important tool for raising funds and publicity for conservation, and flagship species are often used to figurehead such campaigns. In many cases the selection of flagship species may seem obvious – giant pandas, polar bears, and African elephants have all been used prominently in conservation marketing campaigns, and jaguars, puma and lions are all figureheads of instantly recognisable private sector brands. However conservation marketing has only recently emerged as a field in its own right and there is little empirical research on which species people prefer for conservation, and which attributes are associated with these preferences.

My research into conservation marketing includes collaborations with market research firms to explore some of these issues. Particularly, the focus of my work will be to understand how attitudes to conservation vary among local communities who encounter conflict with large carnivores on a daily basis.

Conservation planning
Building on the work conducted in my DPhil thesis I am also interested in understanding how future strategies for conservation in South East Asia might impact clouded leopard populations and in particular their population connectivity.

Borneo has lost over 30% of its forested area since 1973 presenting a major threat for much of Borneo’s biodiversity. In addition to the loss of habitat, deforestation has led to a large increase in forest fragmentation with isolated patches of forest standing like islands in a human dominated landscape. Small isolated populations are more vulnerable to extinction and risk suffering from inbreeding depression.

During my DPhil I modelled the correlates of forest loss across Borneo to produce a map of predicted future deforestation risk. The model was combined with models of clouded leopard distributions to understand how future land use changes might impact population connectivity and gene flow for Borneo’s clouded leopards. Data on clouded leopard distributions is sparse and so the models I prepared during my DPhil were, by necessity, based on expert opinion. However WildCRU hosts a large number of field projects that are amassing an enormous dataset on clouded leopard distributions.

My research involves collaborating with this wider clouded leopard team to integrate empirical field data into our models. Our goal is to develop empirically derived maps of priority areas for clouded leopard conservation, and to use these to develop a holistic conservation plan that maintains population connectivity and gene flow while accounting for local development strategies.