Founded in 1826, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) is an international scientific, conservation and educational charity whose mission is to promote and achieve the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats.
Dr Raj Amin is a Senior Wildlife Biologist at Zoological Society London (ZSL), and Technical Advisor to the Cape Leopard Trust. Dr Amin's interests centre around conservation biology, with an emphasis on science-based conservation of some of the world's most highly threatened species, with work spanning many aspects from international wildlife research and monitoring, wildlife health, species recovery planning and capacity building. Dr Amin has been involved in researching factors threatening species and developing a strong evidence base for conservation planning. This has helped develop national conservation strategies for a number of species, including more recently the Black rhino, African elephant, Hirola and Roan antelope. Raj worked closely with Kenya Wildlife Service to establish areas for building up populations and range expansion such as the Tsavo West Intensive Protection Zone, the Ngulia Rhino Sanctuary extension, Hirola Predator Proof Sanctuary and the Aberdare Salient Intensive Protection Zone. In recent years he also assisted the South Africa Crane Conservation programme, the national tiger Programme in India, the national Greater one-horned rhino recovery programme in Nepal and the Gangetic river dolphin in the Brahmaputra River.
Dr Amin is a founding member of SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool), a protected area management tool being rolled out globally (http://smartconservationtools.org/), and will be applied as part of the Cederberg Research Project. Raj has also been instrumental in developing, along with some of his colleagues, camera trap methods and the ZSL camera trap tool to help manage and analyse large volumes of camera-trap images being generated as part of scientific wildlife research. This tool enables improved wildlife surveys across research sites and habitats to provide measures of management impact on conservation goals. These methods and tool will be used for Cape leopard and other species surveys.
