Colby Loucks
Vice President, Wildlife Conservation Program

Colby Loucks joined WWF in 1996 and leads WWF’s Wildlife Crime Technology Project which focuses on harnessing the cutting-edge technologies to fight poaching. He also leads WWF’s effort to evaluate the environmental, biological and social impacts of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification in tropical forests.
Early in his WWF career, Colby led ecoregion conservation assessments for North America and the Indo-Pacific region, and led ecoregion planning analyses in the eastern Himalayas, Indochina, Mexico and China's southwest temperate forests. He continued to combine his expertise in GIS, conservation biology and landscape ecology to identify remaining habitat for pandas in China's Shaanxi Province. This work was the foundation for the Chinese government’s decision to more than double the region's protected areas to conserve giant pandas.
Colby has contributed to several global teams that developed, created, and published the Global 200, Alliance for Zero Extinction, and estimating and mapping humanity’s global consumption patterns. More recently, he led an analysis in Cambodia that created a 50 year timeline connecting the impacts of war and peace to species loss; published research on prioritizing global tiger conservation areas; analyzing the impacts of sea level rise on tiger populations in Bangladesh's Sundarbans ecosystem; and identification of critical migration corridors for pronghorn antelope in the USA’s Northern Great Plains.
“I’m excited to be part of a movement which is harnessing new technologies that could revolutionize our mission of saving the planet.”
In The News
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WIRED magazine
In Africa, technology is the final weapon in the deadly poaching war
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Culture Trip
How Technology Is Helping Fight Poaching in Kenya
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iQ Magazine
Anti-Poaching Technology Protects Animals in Africa
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Earther
Wild Vertebrate Populations Have Declined 60 Percent in Last 40 Years, Alarming Report Finds
Videos
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Play Video
Plug Into NatureColby Loucks and other WWF experts talk about their childhood memories being outdoors and its connection to their careers in conservation.
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Play Video
China's Reigning Ambassador: The Giant Panda -
Play Video
What does a farm in Maryland have to do with saving African elephants?When the World Wildlife Fund wanted to figure out an innovative way to stop the illegal poaching of wildlife they went to Google for help. One thing led to another, and soon WWF researchers were testing the technology in a rural Maryland cow pasture.
More on Colby
Title
Vice President
Education
- MEM - Resource Ecology, Duke University
- BS - Biology, The College of William and Mary
Areas of Expertise
- Biodiversity conservation
- Landscape ecology
- Conservation biology
- Biogeography
- Conservation planning