Tanzania

Natural Capital Project co-founder Ricketts is the project’s liaison with World Wildlife Fund, and, like Kareiva, provides strategic guidance. His interests span a broad range of topics in ecology and conservation biology, from global analyses of biodiversity patterns to field studies on the ecological and economic effects of land-use change. Ricketts led WWF’s conservation assessment of North American eco-regions, the first in a continuing series published by Island Press. Ricketts’ current research focuses on the agricultural value of wild pollinators and their habitats, and on mapping the economic costs and benefits of conservation. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and has been recognized with awards from the Society for Conservation Biology, the National Science Foundation, the Summit Foundation, and others.

For more than ten years, Burgess has conducted biodiversity research and conservation management projects in the UK, Denmark, Eastern Europe, and especially Eastern Africa. Initially he worked in the lowland coastal forests, but over the past decade his efforts have been directed towards the Eastern Arc Mountains. He has undertaken research work in the field and coordinated programs in the Eastern Arc spanning all aspects of conservation - from the local communities and NGOs to National Government and the international agencies such as the UN. In the past three years he was a technical advisor to the Tanzanian Government and developed a conservation strategy for the Eastern Arc Mountains and helped establish a conservation endowment fund for these mountains (http://easternarc.or.tz).

As a Reader in Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, Balmford helps run a research group in conservation science. He is interested in the costs and benefits of effective conservation, quantifying the changing state of nature, evaluating the success of conservation interventions, and exploring how conservation efforts might best be reconciled with other land uses, especially in developing countries. He is extremely keen on building close working relationships between conservation scientists and conservation practitioners, and so co-founded the Cambridge Conservation Forum (a network bringing together over 1,000 conservation professionals from around 36 NGOs, agencies and research groups), and the annual Student Conference on Conservation Science. He has worked in Africa since 1986.

White is a hydrologist with 30 years of international experience on river basin monitoring and modelling, with an emphasis on evaluating the impacts of catchment management and external change (e.g. climate) on hydrological process. She is currently the hydrology lead for the Leverhulme funded “Valuing the Arc: linking science with stakeholders to sustain natural capital” which is focussed on the Eastern Arc Mountains demonstration site of the Natural Capital Project; White is also a hydrology advisor to the Natural Capital Project. White heads a cross-disciplinary research institute, whose staff work on land resources monitoring, integrated land and water management, ecosystem function and ecological restoration.