My background is mainly in species conservation, education and capacity exchange. I researched mother-young interactions in gorillas and chimpanzees, in captivity and the wild. After that, I worked for three years in Indonesia, where I developed and implemented youth ambassador and community engagement programmes on local and regional scales. I co-founded WildHub, a community of nature conservation professionals, in 2020 and work as their Community Lead. I am furthermore on the Advisory Board of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent where I obtained my PhD on capacity development for conservation in 2022. 

After a decade of training to be a wildlife conservationist, I founded Lonely Conservationists to help conservationists thrive by providing a platform to be heard, employment pathways and a strong community foundation. As well as running Lonely Conservationists, I teach sustainability incursions and excursions to school students in a classroom, forest and marine park environments.

I have been working for the last 3 years with World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)- India in the eastern Himalayas. My interests and research fall in an interdisciplinary field of ecology and social sciences. My interests are particularly in community based conservation approaches, understanding social-ecological systems and the role of Traditional ecological knowledge in conservation.

I am a conservation biologist with great interest in the application of conservation science into a practical solution. I work with scientists, practitioners and academics in conservation and sustainability sector. Specialties: SE Asia terrestrial ecology (in bats and other mammals), High Conservation Values (HCV), Natural Resource Management & Conservation, Interdisciplinary Research, Quality Assurance, Sustainability Issues (in oil palm sector).

I have a background in Social Anthropology and recently graduated from DICE with an MSc in Conservation and Rural Development. I carried out fieldwork in Uganda for my dissertation focusing on the impacts of tourism and conservation on residents working in community-led enterprises that live around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park. Prior to that I interned at Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) a grassroots NGO focused on improving community well-being and mountain gorilla conservation using a one health approach. . I believe that securing and supporting the rights of indigenous and local people are crucial and I am passionate about environmental and social justice and interested in the political ecology of conservation, convivial conservation and bio-cultural approaches to conservation.

Is your organisation's technology decision-making as structured as it needs to be? Conservation organisations face real pressure to adopt technology, often without a clear process for assessing whether it fits their context, capacity, and conservation goals. The free Conservation Technology Decision Quiz takes five minutes. It scores your approach across three areas: Decision Clarity, Fit and Feasibility, and Delivery and Performance. Results include practical recommendations matched to your score, so you can see where your decision process is strong and what to address first. Start here: Technology Decision Quiz I work with conservation organisations and funders on structured technology decision-making, the process that determines whether adoption actually works. Twenty-five years in conservation across the Global South. Technology-agnostic, no vendor affiliations. If your team is navigating a technology decision, evaluating a pilot, or funding organisations that are, I'd welcome a conversation. BACKGROUND Dr. Louisa Richmond-Coggan. My career spans field-based ecology, international NGO and policy work, academic leadership, and conservation technology decision-making. Field career: large carnivore ecology and human-wildlife coexistence research across Eastern and Southern Africa, including as Head of Ecology at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. I led Namibia's National Leopard Census, a multi-stakeholder project whose results fed into national and international policy. I built the Carnivore Tracker app, the first of its kind in Namibia. Institutional career: BirdLife International, UNEP-WCMC, TRAFFIC International, Earthwatch. Academic Dean at the School of Wildlife Conservation at the African Leadership University. Technology and innovation work with IUCN Tech4Nature, including leading three Innovation Challenge Workshops and contributing to the strategic guidance framework on conservation technology adoption. The Navigating Web 3.0 Guide: A Tool for Conservation came out of that work. It is a decision-support tool that starts with your conservation goals and operational realities, not the technology. 34 guided questions assess which emerging technologies are worth exploring across four areas: data collection and management, resource allocation and financial management, collaboration and communication, and monitoring and evaluation. Now integrated into the IUCN GSAP SKILLS platform. This guide is where the decision-support work started, and it remains the clearest entry point into conservation technology decision-making for teams new to this field. Research at the International Conservation Technology Conference, Lima in 2026 confirmed what I had been building toward: the gap in conservation technology is not the tools. It is the structured process for deciding whether, which, and how technology fits an organisation's context. PhD, Nottingham Trent University. MSc Conservation Biology, Durrell Institute. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. IUCN WCPA Task Force on Human-Wildlife Coexistence. Member of the Nature Tech Collective and Top Tier Impact.