ALUMNI Spotlight

Eric Dinerstein

Dr. Eric Dinerstein, the World Wildlife Fund’s Chief Scientist and Vice President, Conservation Science, will give the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences 2011 “Sustaining our World” Winter Lecture, "All Together Now: Linking Ecosystem Services, Endangered Species Conservation, and Local Livelihoods.” The lecture, free and open to the public, will be presented at 6 p.m., Thursday, March 1, in Kane 220, and is sponsored by the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and the College of the Environment. Advance registration is requested at http://engage.washington.edu/site/Calendar?id=105861&view=Detail.

A School of Environmental and Forest Sciences alumnus with MS and PhD degrees in wildlife science, Dinerstein is a 24-year veteran of the World Wildlife Fund, where he has led an unprecedented effort to identify every ecoregion on earth and define the most biologically important wildlife species. Known as the “Global 200,” this effort guides WWF’s fieldwork in more than 100 countries and has helped develop key strategies to protect a number of endangered species, including tigers, elephants, one-horned rhinos, and snow leopards. Most recently, Dinerstein has joined a team of tiger conservationists through the Global Tiger Initiative of the World Bank to help double the number of wild tigers by 2022.

In his lecture, Dinerstein will talk about innovative approaches in wildlife conservation that include considering the needs of both humans and wildlife. In his view, “the single greatest challenge for conservation worldwide is to stop the loss of habitat around the world.” Any approach, especially for endangered large mammals, must respond to deforestation and other causes of local extinctions and “range collapse,” where species are confined to increasingly limited habitats. And to consider human needs, they must also link conservation to improving local livelihoods in impoverished regions.

These innovative approaches, including a “wildlife premium market,” currently a pilot project in countries as diverse as Nepal, Kenya, Peru, Thailand, and Madagascar, hypothesize that investors and philanthropists will be more likely to contribute to payment schemes for carbon and other ecosystem services provided by forests if those forests also support charismatic and endangered wildlife. The market approach allows stakeholders to earn income by recovering and maintaining threatened “keystone” species that indirectly protect other species sharing the same habitat, and provides a financial benefit to local communities that engage in conservation stewardship.

But the plight of the tiger will be the main focus of Dinerstein’s talk — of the approximately 350 protected areas worldwide in the tiger’s range, none are now large enough to support a viable population. Dinerstein began his conservation work in 1975 as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, where he conducted a census of the tiger population in the Karnali-Bardia Wildlife Reserve, and where he began to champion the idea of looking at species protection beyond the boundaries of a park to include their habitat at the larger landscape level. Considered groundbreaking at the time, this is now standard practice for large-mammal conservation, and, in his lecture, he will discuss several landscape-scale approaches, including high tech programs using LiDAR to map carbon in tiger habitats.

Interacting with the public, drawing attention to the importance of conservation and related issues such as climate change, is important for Dinerstein, who says, "I try to make people, especially those in their teens and 20s, understand that they could see the end of many species in their lifetime." His prize-winning 2007 book, Tigerland and Other Intended Destinations, is an engaging introduction to conservation biology via the memoirs of a scientist who has traveled throughout the world to study and defend endangered species.