Previous Spotlights

Sarah is a dual-degree master’s student studying International Nature Conservation, a bi-national program between Germany and New Zealand. Her background is interdisciplinary with her bachelor’s studies focused on bridging the social and natural sciences. Currently, she is working with the United Nations’ Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Sarah will be conducting her master’s research as a visiting scholar with the Global Mammal Assessment program at the Sapienza University of Rome.

What got you into ConSoSci?

Being an environmental science and international nature conservation student, I studied the world’s greatest environmental challenges such as climate change and biodiversity loss. Faced with these challenging topics in university, I often racked my brain trying to come up with new ideas and strategies to mitigate these issues and asked myself big questions like how and why our current approaches are insufficient. What I have come to realize is that people are the drivers of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss, yet people are also the solution. The social sciences offer new tactics, knowledge, and resources to address and understand human behavior. Social science, used with natural sciences, can strengthen strategies to engage people and galvanize conservation action. I am inspired to move forward in my research and actively engage with social scientist to improve conservation outcomes.

What is your current research?

My current research seeks to support countries as they work to preserve and expand protected and conserved areas with the ultimate goal of maintaining biodiversity for future generations by achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. The research contributes to shaping the conservation landscape to work for both traditional protection and sustainable use at the global level. My thesis research builds on this topic as I will explore the future trends of biodiversity using a modeling and scenario approach and applying these projections to understand their relationships to globally agreed goals.

Who is your conservation idol/mentor?

The upcoming United Nations Decade is dedicated to Sustainable Oceans. There is no better scientist than Dr. Sylvia Earle to name as my conservation idol in light of this global commitment to ocean conservation. She is an acclaimed scientist and environmental heroine who is changing our world for the better. As a young student, I saw that she paved the way for women in science in a field that was predominantly male. Dr. Earle’s commitment to communicating science and conservation optimism continues to inspired me. Because we share a passion for safeguarding protected areas, I admire her fight for marine hotspots and protected areas, or Hope Spots, through her organization called Mission Blue.

Sarah Horsley is a PhD student working towards a joint degree in Integrative Conservation and Forest Resources at the University of Georgia. She comes from an interdisciplinary background in social science, natural science, and the digital humanities. Sarah is interested in the application of environmental social sciences toward conservation, including environmental perceptions, behaviors, and socio-cultural valuation methods for decision-making. Her research focuses on characterizing the concept of iconic species and their contributions toward a sense of place and conservation efforts in nature-based destinations. Currently, she spends her summers researching the significance of the sea turtle and live oak on Georgia’s coast and the rest of the year planning the 2018 Integrative Conservation Conference in Athens, Georgia. Sarah is also interested in teaching scientists to be storytellers and works as a scientific illustrator and visual artist. You can see her work at www.sarahhorsley.com.

What got you into ConSoSci?

For too long I assumed that any conservation or environmental problem only needed natural science to find the solution. But when I really started to look these problems case by case, the social and human aspects appeared to be the majority of both the issue and the solution. When I realized this, I decided that to have the greatest impact on addressing conservation issues I needed to look to social science. However, conservation problems are complex and require lots of contextual knowledge, so I try my best to research the social aspects with as much understanding of the natural, economic, and political as I can manage as a graduate student!

Nature poetry started my interest in conservation. There were quite a few poets that describe how precious moments of being, understanding, and communing in nature are and what a loss we would be at without our spirited ties to the natural world. I really value the moments in nature that tell us more about our world, which is often reflected in nature writing and nature poetry, so I decided I needed to know more about how we as humans see and understand these resources and how we protect them for the well-being of ecosystems. One of my favorites, Mary Oliver, writes, “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

What kind of research do you do?

I’m all about mixed methods. I like combining qualitative and quantitative inquiry to really get both a rich and broad perspective on a question. I’m also currently working on developing research that uses methods and theoretical frameworks from both the social and nature sciences. Because I have a background in both, this allows me to keep by skills and knowledge sharp and be a more interdisciplinary person. I’m also a proponent of incorporating data and techniques from the humanities into scientific research, such as narrative, arts-based inquiry, and translating findings into science communication through all expressive media.

Who is your conservation idol?

Anyone working to solve the issues of microplastics and ocean pollution. I’d have to say my current idol is Mr. Trash Wheel who is voraciously devouring litter that enters the Baltimore Harbor.

Sophia (@ScientistSophia) is a master’s student studying international nature conservation (M.I.N.C.) at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and Lincoln University, New Zealand. Her research focuses on understanding human-nature relationships and how individuals’ values influence their behavior. Integrating conservation psychology along with other social and natural sciences, her research seeks to engage people in pro-environmental behaviors and improve the efficacy of conservation interventions. Sophia previously worked in the Peruvian Amazon where she evaluated land users’ interest in payments for ecosystem services (PES). Here she saw the great need for behavioral scientists to improve conservation efforts. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign completing her thesis research exploring park users’ value structures and their pro-environmental behaviors in Denali National Park, Alaska. Sophia plans on pursuing a PhD in human dimensions of conservation focused on deforestation prevention in Latin America.

What got you into ConSoSci?

During my undergraduate studies, I was lucky enough to meet a (then) PhD student at the University of Washington who was conducting forest conservation research in Peru. I began working for him on a project that sought to assess interest in payments for ecosystem services (PES) in Madre de Dios, Peru. We surveyed several hundred gold miners and farmers in the Manu-Tambopata corridor to understand their interest in hypothetical conservation policies. I loved working with the local people in Peru to better understand their communities and needs. During this research, we used a variety of social science techniques, and I realized how powerful they were for developing conservation interventions. This experience ultimately led me to my current field of study—conservation psychology—because I realized how imperative it is to understand human behavior in order to address pressing conservation issues.

What is your current research?

My thesis research explores human values and how they relate to pro-environmental behavior. We surveyed 700 park users at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, asking about their values and what kinds of pro-environmental behaviors they engage in. We are testing two new value dimensions to explore their relationships with pro-environmental behaviors to develop a more nuanced understanding of environmental values and also help decision-makers and park managers improve park policy and user experience.

Who is your conservation idol/mentor?

My conservation crushes, as I like to call them, are Dr. E.J. Milner-Gulland for her novel integration of behavior change sciences to conservation interventions. Dr. William Laurance is also someone I look up to for his extensive research deforestation and forest conservation in Latin America. Both of these researchers are paragons in their respective fields and are inspirations for my future research and career path.

Kathayoon Khalil, PhD is the Conservation Impact Manager for the Oregon Zoo. Prior to joining the zoo, Kathayoon was the Principal Evaluator for the Seattle Aquarium. She received her PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design from Stanford University, her Masters of Environmental Science from the Yale School of the Environment and her Bachelors in Organismal Biology from Claremont McKenna College.

Kathayoon is a conservation psychologist and a social scientist. As such, Kathayoon oversees the creation and implementation of the zoo’s conservation strategy, as well as all evaluation, visitor studies, and social science research for the Zoo. Additionally, Kathayoon collaborates with colleagues from around the world on research projects to advance our understanding of learning in zoos and aquariums. Kathayoon is also a researcher for Fostering Empathy for Animals, a joint project among the Seattle Aquarium, the Woodland Park Zoo, and the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium. In this capacity, Kathayoon participates in publications, public speaking engagements, and conducts workshops on empathy development and measurement.

Kathayoon started her career at as a teen volunteer at the Oregon Zoo and quickly developed a passion for wildlife and conservation. Through over a decade of work in zoo education, Kathayoon has implemented authentic approaches to evaluating visitor learning, including attitude and behavior changes that may have resulted from their visit. Kathayoon is an alumna of the Emerging Wildlife Conservation Leaders program as well as an instructor for Project Dragonfly at Miami University of Ohio. In her spare time, Kathayoon enjoys yoga, running, doing watercolor painting and calligraphy, and hanging out with her friends, family, and kitties, Catniss and Cuzco.

What inspired your interest in applying social science to conservation issues?

I started out working at Oregon Zoo as a ZooTeen and fell in love with the passion of the people I worked with. This also sparked my interest in wildlife conservation, and from there I knew I wanted to work in the wildlife sciences. This led to me doing a bachelor’s degree in herpetology, where I spent a lot of time in the desert looking for various lizard species. Here, I realised that traditional field biology was not allowing me to use my strongest assets, such as my people/social skills and inter-personal skills. I spent my college years doing field work during the school year and spending my summers back at the zoo as a camp counsellor. After some time, I had a conversation with my then mentor, who was the Director of Education at the zoo. We both realised that there was very little data around the impacts of zoo education and how people may be inspired by their experiences at the zoo, and a great deal of confusion around how to evaluate visitor learning, attitude, and action. Seeing this as a big gap in our work, I started doing evaluations for the zoo and moving in a different direction of the conservation sphere, focused more on the social sciences, where I’ve been working ever since!

How do you see social science being integrated into the work of Zoos and what is the potential impact of better integration?

Conservation first and foremost is a people problem, which is something we need to be continually reminded of. Integration can be challenging because social science does require a different skill set, especially literacy around what good social science looks like. A lot of social science work is about asking the right questions and finding linkages between theory and practice. Zoos are one of the best places to do conservation social science work; we serve millions of people every year and are one of the largest outlets for conservation in the world, usually being one of the only places people can come to see wildlife. Given these audiences, it is important to recognise all that we can offer to the field of conservation – which is more than traditional biological or ecological data.

I believe we are all evaluative thinkers and have inquiry skills from the moment we are born. The work then is to recognise and minimise bias and ask questions in the right way. Therefore, truly integrated social science is when the project is not driven by the biological sciences with social sciences as an after-thought, but when the social sciences and biological sciences come together to ask and answer those questions. The interdisciplinary approach to conservation will become more crucial moving forward, and without this approach we will not see the kind of results we want to see.

Also, quite often we see biological/natural scientists adding in a small portion of social science work into their projects and then subsequently doing this research themselves. However, many of them do not realise that social science research requires a distinct skillset, and they often do not have the skills to carry out an effective social science project. By co-creating and collaborating on these research projects, we can all offer our expertise to ensure that the products are useful, rigorous, and an accurate reflection of the phenomena we are trying to measure.

In your work, how do you inform key scientific debates for conservation policy?

I do not directly do a lot of the policy work myself. However, my work is trying to bridge the science world and the practical world – which is where a lot of the policy world exists. Often, there is a lot of work going on in the science world behind the walls of academic institutions, resulting in very little translation of this science in the practical sphere. Therefore, quite often we see, especially in zoos and aquariums, that the practitioners and policy makers need more information on what has been learned in the academic and research sectors. I went into my PhD knowing that I had no intention of going back going into the academic world, but instead I wanted to help to advance the goal of making sure that research and practice are linked in meaningful way.

What advice would you have for an aspiring conservation social scientist?

The resounding theme that has helped me accomplish everything I have is community. All that I have done has been through having an excellent support staff and team beside me. This work is never done alone, so it’s important to embed yourself into your community and rely on them, as well as help whenever they need help too.

It is also important to be yourself, know your strengths and do what you really want to do. You’ll find that seemingly great opportunities will present themselves, but require you to work in areas you’re not passionate about or compromise on your goals. I firmly believe you’ll be much happier in the long run if you stick to what you love. It can be really tempting to say yes to every opportunity to come your way, but it is important to know when to say yes and when to say no, and when to walk away when something isn’t right the way you want it. There’s a difference between doing something new because it will help you grow and challenge you in new ways, and doing something that you won’t enjoy because you think you should. Don’t force it to make it fit.

What has been a highlight of your career so far?

One of the major highlights of my career is the time I spent work at the Zoo Camp at the Oregon Zoo. I worked for nine years in this enormous program where we saw over 4000 students a summer. I worked with an incredible team of people who loved what they did. It was fun and invigorating and stimulating. Every day brought new challenges, laughs, memories, and opportunities. I often misses my work there, but I gained skills that I hold and use to this day, like public speaking, management, and how to find the fun in every situation. Ultimately you have to move on, but the friendships and experiences of Zoo Camp are still so dear to me.

Who is someone who inspires you in the conservation field, and why?

I admire and respect anyone who leads with kindness. We often come across those who work aggressively; trying to get as many grants as possible, as many papers published as they can, to be the main voice in the room. However, it is equally valuable to boost the voice of others and make space for people who have different opinions or approaches. It’s so refreshing to find leaders who are just nice people – and incredibly accomplished!

I also really admire my first mentors, Anne Warner and Tony Vecchio, who took a chance on me as a 20-year-old kid who wanted to be a zoo leader. I am also inspired by my friends working in this field who believe in their institutions and our missions and are constantly pushing conservation forward despite the recent struggles. It’s so inspirational to work with such a committed, passionate, and warm group of colleagues – it’s the best thing about this field.

Patricia Manzano Fischer has a PhD on Sustainability Science at the National Autonomous university of Mexico (UNAM). She did her research on the beliefs and motives behind beef consumption among university students, in order to inform the design of effective behavioural change interventions. Her aim is to contribute to biodiversity conservation through behavioural research and population specific interventions.

SWG Members Spotlight: Dr. Patricia Manzano Fischer

Prior to the PhD, Patricia gained a bachelor’s degree in biology from UNAM, and an M.Sc. from the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology, University of Oxford, England. Patricia has a wide range of experience, from grassland bird ecology; to environmental education; to wildlife and utility lines conflicts; and, finally, environmental sustainability.  She has recently joined the Social Science Working Group Board.

What inspired your interest in applying social science to conservation issues?

I was working on the conservation of grassland birds during my Masters, and started doing environmental education work with the local people in a very rural part of Mexico. People used to tell me that they thought they were living in a horrible place, a grassland in the middle of nowhere. We started creating awareness on the importance of grasslands, on the animals that inhabit this ecosystem, and specially, on the role of prairie dogs. Many animals live in the burrows they dig (snakes, toads, insects, burrowing owls, foxes), many others eat them (coyotes, foxes, badgers, eagles, hawks), and they also create a habitat that benefits species that require or like short grasses (bison, sparrows, plovers). We created comic books, and ran photo exhibitions. We wanted people to feel proud of their land, so they would feel the need to protect it. The comic book was a hit, people use to talk about it and discuss if the information was right. It was amazing to see them reading it and take it seriously.

I went on to work in environmental education for 20 years, developing materials with teachers and schools to educate students on environmental issues. However, it was difficult to achieve change. I thought to myself, that there must be a way to do it, so I started exploring the field of psychology and behaviour change. The movement to use psychology in conservation is rather recent, and much of the literature on behaviour change interventions was on health. I thought, if behaviour change interventions and psychology can help break habits such as smoking, which can be very difficult to stop, then surely psychology can be used to encourage relatively smaller changes towards more sustainable behaviours.

I started taking some psychology courses online. I then wanted to apply for a PhD in sustainability science, drawing on conservation psychology to explore how to design and implement interventions to encourage more sustainable behaviours. I feel so lucky that my programme allowed me to do that. My project was the only one looking at conservation psychology. I had friends in the same programme who were sociologists, or engineers. It was very interesting to mix with people from such diverse backgrounds and projects.

Who is someone who has inspired your work, and why?

Someone who has been really influential in my PhD research is Professor Susan Michie, a psychologist based in the UK who looks at how to design behaviour change interventions. I based my work on the approaches she and her lab had developed. I remember being really inspired to see that she specifically mentions how her work could be applied for conservation and sustainability related issue, and I even found some papers that were supporting her method to reduce beef consumption.

I also read the book “Conservation Psychology: Understanding and promoting human care for nature’ by Susan Clayton and Gene Myers, from start to finish. One thing that caught my attention, was how the book states that every conservation team should have a psychologist working with them, because of the need to work with and understand people. Animals are not disappearing because they want to, they are disappearing because of human behaviour, so we need to change the behaviour of people to preserve what is left.

What has been a highlight of your career so far?

There are two things that have marked my career. The first was when the local communities where I worked in Mexico, decided to support idea of their local area becoming a biosphere reserve. Often, if an area is declared a nature reserve, it can be seen as a huge burden to those who live close by. But here, after working with the communities they saw that it was important, and they ended up supporting the whole process. This highlighted to me how important working with and understanding motivations and behaviours is in conservation.

The other highlight is a more personal one. I’ve been working with beef consumption for almost six years. When I started my research, I would tell the research group about all the problems with unsustainable beef production, and the need to reduce consumption. As a result, my supervisor doesn’t eat beef anymore. Every time I give a talk and explain why I do what I do, many people approach me to talk about it. Several have realised that it’s not too difficult to stop or reduce their beef consumption. It’s so nice to know that the work that I’m doing results in positive changes in people’s behaviour, for the benefit of conservation and environmental sustainability.