As Executive Director of Conservation Measures and Rights+Communities for the Wildlife Conservation Society, David Wilkie seeks to strengthen the practice of WCS conservation worldwide, provide evidence to our board, staff, donors, partners and supporters that our efforts are having a measurable conservation impact, and to raise donor and public awareness of our numerous and effective partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. David joined WCS in 2001. Since then he has led efforts to ensure that WCS field programs identify explicit conservation objectives for which we hold ourselves accountable, and tactically monitor and report our conservation progress.
He is a founder of the Conservation Measures Partnership – a joint venture of conservation NGOs committed to improving the practice of conservation by promoting adoption of a consensus-based set of standards for planning, implementation and measuring conservation impact. He was co-chair of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force, and helped establish the Conservation Initiative on Human Rights. He helped establish and is a member of the WCS Institutional Review Board for protection of human subjects. David has over 30 years of experience working in community-based natural resource conservation (CBNRM) in Central Africa, Central and South America and Asia. He is a Ph.D. wildlife ecologist with a post-doctoral anthropology specialization in the socio-economic drivers of natural resource use practices. His work covers the impacts of commercialization of non-timber forest products on forest conservation; the role that logging plays in the commercial wildlife trade; the role that income, prices, and taste preferences play in determining demand for wildlife; the use of conditional direct payments as a tool for biodiversity conservation in developing countries; and the use of satellite imagery, and agent-based, spatial simulations to model present and future tropical forest loss. He has published more than 140 peer reviewed articles and books.