Professor Amy Dickman established is the joint CEO of Lion Landscapes, which works to help conserve wildlife in some of the most important biodiversity areas of Africa. These areas include some of the most important areas in the world for big cats, but also have an extremely high level of lion killing, as lions and other carnivores impose high costs on poverty-stricken local people. Amy and her team are working with local communities to reduce carnivore attacks, providing villagers with real benefits from carnivore presence, engaging warriors in conservation and training the next generation of local conservation leaders. It has been a challenging endeavour, given the remote location and secretive and hostile nature of the tribe responsible for most lion-killing. In her talk, Amy will discuss the significance of this project, the difficulties of working in an area where witchcraft and mythology abound, and the conservation successes that are already emerging from this important work.

Amy Dickman biography
Amy is the Kaplan Senior Research Fellow in Felid Conservation and Professor of Wildlife Conservation at Oxford University, and has over 25 years experience working on large carnivores in Africa, specialising in human-carnivore conflict. She has an MSc from Oxford University and a PhD from University College London, and has published over 80 scientific papers and book chapters on large carnivore ecology and conservation. She is a member of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group, the Human-Wildlife Conflict Collaboration, the African Lion Working Group, the IUCN Human-Wildlife Conflict task Force, and is a National Geographic Explorer. She has received multiple awards for her work, including the Rabinowitz-Kaplan Prize for the Next Generation in Wild Cat Conservation and the St Louis Zoo Conservation Award.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed within this lecture are those of the author alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery/Biodiversity Network, or its researchers.