Christine Wilkinson
Human-wildlife conflict is an increasingly intense issue facing communities in wildlife dispersal areas of East Africa, particularly as pastoralists shift to agropastoralism or agriculture as their primary source of subsistence and income. I'm interested in creating fine-scale spatial analysis of the intersections between landscape permeability, human and wildlife resource use, and human-wildlife conflict in southern Kenya. This work will inform how to empower communities in wildlife dispersal areas to create their own solutions to human-wildlife conflict, which will benefit human livelihoods while allowing wildlife to thrive.
In the past I've worked on behavioral and movement ecology, wildlife management, and ecology education in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. I have also spent many years at the California Academy of Sciences creating and implementing informal science education for teens. Throughout my work, I am hoping to use these intersections of my experience to pilot applied ecology education for schools in my research areas, since empowerment and environmental "sense of place" begins at a young age.