I'm Liane, and I am a WildLearning Specialist at WildTeam! I'm looking forward to getting to know you all! For the last few years, I've been working in Seychelles, focusing on island and marine conservation efforts, particularly coral restoration and turtle nesting monitoring. If you ask me questions about coral, be prepared for me to get very nerdy about it! Prior to that, I was managing a project in Northern Thailand, where I worked closely with a local community to set up ethical elephant experiences in their village. In my free time, I love running and hiking, and being anywhere in nature. I have also learnt to freedive in the last few years and enjoy doing that when possible. I'm really interested in talking to different people and learning from them and their unique experiences.

I work with Indigenous communities in all the practical and strategic processes that support their territorial autonomy and self-determined developmental agendas. In a beautifully complex world, that can mean anything from technical GIS support, monitoring biodiversity in territory, analyzing invasions and threats to territory, strategizing and obtaining the necessary data to fill gaps to support legal cases against threats and support informed decision-making. I am an interdisciplinary academic-activist working with Indigenous nationalities and representative organisations in pursuit and actualization of their autonomy and collectively self-determined vision. I have worked on the intersection between international law, national judicial systems, international environmental commitments, extractive industries and the plural visions of Indigenous Peoples and other historically minoritized groups. My focus has been on human rights-based approaches to conservation and what they imply in current law, traditional/local ecological knowledge, and Indigenous leadership in navigating an encroaching world (community-based monitoring and mapping of territory (for biodiversity, threats, culture, etc.)). I have worked across South America and both South and Southeast Asia and have now returned to the Amazonian region as the monitoring field coordinator for Amazon Frontlines. For my work things feel free to skim my LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/tomatitoperdido

My background is mainly in species conservation, education and capacity development. 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 work as Community Manager at WildHub since 2020, and I am an Associate Member 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. 

Gilles Florent SORO holds a Master’s Degree in Climate Change and Marine Sciences from the Atlantic Technical University of Cape Verde and a Bachelor’s Degree in Biological Sciences (Zoology, Biology and Animal Ecology; Life and Earth Sciences). Gilles is passionate about biodiversity conservation, with a particular focus on the conservation of sharks and rays, and works as a project coordinator of the NGO Conservation des Espèces Marines (CEM) in Côte d'Ivoire, and as Deputy Coordinator of the West African Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WASTCON).