Conservation Science

Associate

Areas of Expertise: Conservation Biology, Latin American Conservation Issues, Neotropical Mammals, Species Distributions, Terrestrial Ecoregions of Latin America & Caribbean, Conservation design, kayaking

Jan Schipper
© WWF

Jan Schipper joined WWF-US in 2000 as a Latin American biodiversity and conservation specialist for the Conservation Science Program. His major project to date has been the Terrestrial Ecoregions of Latin America and the Caribbean, due to be published early next year with Island Press. He has also worked on the terrestrial ecoregions project for Africa, and contributed as an editor and scientific advisor to Wild World, a joint project with National Geographic. Schipper's background is as a field ecologist, and he has spent over 5 years in Costa Rica tracking felids and Neotropical otter, conducting biodiversity inventories in the rainforest canopy, and monitoring sea turtle populations, among other projects. Prior to working at WWF, Jan was the field coordinator and program manager for the Caribbean Conservation Corporations biological field station in Tortuguero, Costa Rica - which has the second largest nesting population of green turtles in the world. Jan has a B.A. in biology with an emphasis in tropical ecology (Western State College of Colorado) and in January 2003 became a Ph.D. candidate in a joint dissertation between the University of Idaho and the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), in Costa Rica.