World Wildlife Fund

Conservation Science

Eric Wikramanayake, Ph. D.

Senior Conservation Scientist

Areas of Expertise: Biodiversity conservation and planning, community and landscape ecology, tropical freshwater fish ecology, large mammal ecology and conservation, Asia region

Eric Wikramanayake
© WWF

Eric Wikramanayake is a senior conservation scientist providing technical assistance and advice to WWF's ecoregion-based conservation program and flagship species (elephant, rhino, and tiger) programs in Asia. He took the lead role in producing a map of ecoregions for the Asia-Pacific region and a book that assess the conservation status of the ecoregions, which was published by Island Press. He was also involved in a gap analysis of the Himalaya, and assisted with preparing the biological vision for the Eastern Himalaya. Wikramanayake also took the lead in developing WWF's priority-setting exercise for tiger conservation, which is now used widely by tiger biologists and funding agencies. Before joining WWF-US, Eric worked for ten years as a consultant for WWF-Bhutan Program and WWF-Indochina, where he did extensive field work and conservation planning in Bhutan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and was with the team of biologists that discovered a new species of deer in the Annamite Mountains along the border between Vietnam and Laos. Wikramanayake received his Ph.D. from University of California, Davis in 1988. His thesis was on ecological structure and conservation of fish assemblages in tropical wet-zone streams of Sri Lanka. He then became a postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, where he studied the thermal ecology and behavior of monitor lizards, including the largest lizard in the world, the Komodo dragon that lives on three small islands in eastern Indonesia. In addition to technical papers, he has written several popular articles about his work.

Email: eric.wikramanayake@wwfus.org

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