With Dr. Justine Shanti Alexander and Terry Townshend

China is home to the largest number of wild snow leopards in the world. The current snow leopard population in China is estimated between 2,000-2,500 and organizations like Snow Leopard Trust and Shan Shui Conservation Center are leading the efforts in pushing conservation efforts forward.

For this event we’ll be speaking with leading snow leopard conservation experts, Dr. Justine Shanti Alexander and Terry Townshend, to hear about the ongoing efforts in China to save these endangered cats.

Speaker:

Dr. Justine Shanti Alexander

Executive Director, Snow Leopard Network 

Justine Shanti Alexander is the Executive Director of the Snow Leopard Network and the Regional Ecologist for the Snow Leopard Trust. Through the Network she has brought a focus on capacity sharing and building links between conservationists on the ground and scientists across the snow leopard range and globally. She supports snow leopard research and community conservation work across China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan and India. She also provides technical and coordination support to the Population Assessment of the World’s Snow Leopards (PAWS). She has a particular interest in supporting and promoting the position of women in conservation. She holds a PhD in snow leopard population assessments from Beijing Forestry University and a MSc in Conservation Science from Imperial College London.

Terry Townsend

Fellow, Paulson Institute 

Terry Townshend is a Beijing-based consultant on climate change and biodiversity.  He founded Birding Beijing to celebrate the birds and other wildlife of China’s capital city and set up citizen science projects to track the migrations of the Beijing Swift and the Beijing Cuckoo, both of which were found to migrate to Southern Africa for the winter, attracting significant media coverage.  In 2016, in partnership with Shan Shui Conservation Center, he devised and helped set up a community-based wildlife watching project with yak herders on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.  He is a Fellow of the Paulson Institute and serves on the Global Advisory Group of BirdLife International, the largest conservation partnership in the world.