Dr Philip Riordan

Postdoctoral Researcher

Senior Research Fellow (Beijing Forestry University)

Director, Wildlife Without Borders (UK)

I run large scale projects, with a focus on the interactions between people and wildlife. This has included epidemiological issues surrounding the control of wildlife diseases, assessments of landscape scale agri-environment interventions, and the integration of top predators with human interests and well being.

For my PhD I studied spatial and resource partitioning within mammalian carnivore assemblages in Africa. I began working for WildCRU in 1999 as a post-doc examining the consequences of culling badgers for the epidemiology of bovine tuberculosis and the effects of social perturbation. Since 2003 I have been coordinating and managing research within the Upper Thames Project (UTP), which aims to assess the impacts on biodiversity of targeting agri-environment schemes across rural landscapes. In 2007 I initiated a comparative project in China, situated in West Jilin province, in collaboration with Dr Shi Kun, Director of the Wildlife Institute at Beijing Forestry University.

In 2008 Dr Shi Kun and I were asked by the Chinese government to develop a programme for research and conservation of the snow leopard in China.This project is on-going, with ongoing surveys and training being carried out in Xinjiang, Sichuan, and Gansu provinces. Additional teams are also starting working in TIbet and Qinghai.

With The Wildlife Institute at BFU, I am coordinating a UK Government Darwin Initiative funded project to building capacity for wild cat conservation across China and to establish robust monitoring within protected areas. This work is being carried out in collaboration with Dr Shi Kun at BFU and the Chinese State Forestry Administration.

I am also Founder and Director of Wildlife Without Borders (UK), a small, agile not for profit civil society organization, seeking to find diplomatic and equitable solutions to the problems we face in sharing the planet with wildlife. More information can found on our website.

Professional Positions
Member of the British Ecological Society
Senior Research Fellow at Beijing Forestry University.
Member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas
Member of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group
Special International Observer of the Cats Specialist Group of China

Human-wildlife interfaces; wildlife diseases; community ecology; spatial ecology