Allard Blom

Allard Blom, World Wildlife Fund, US.

"Allard Blom was born on May 8, 1962 in Breda, The Netherlands. He holds a B.Sc. in Biology of Wageningen University, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D in ecology and wildlife management from the same University. His first experience in Africa was in Gabon, during his M.Sc. While in Gabon he obtained his first job in 1987 carrying out a nation-wide survey of elephants for Wildlife Conservation International. This program was extended with the help of several donors and permitted him to continue in Equatorial Guinea and Zaire, with a brief period at Cambridge in England to analyze the data. This was followed by a period of work as a consultant in Ivory Coast and Kenya, before taking the job as World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project director in the Ituri forest in Zaire. There he helped establish the Okapi Wildlife Reserve in 1992. After the establishment of the reserve, the project was discontinued and he moved to the Central African Republic in January of 1993 to take over as principal technical advisor of the Dzanga-Sangha project. Between 1995 and 1998 he combined this job with the job of national coordinator (country representative) of WWF in the Central African Republic. During this period he obtained authorization and funding to set up the gorilla habituation program. When this program became fully operational he left his job to concentrate on his Ph.D. research associated with the habituation program. He left the Central African Republic at the end of 1999 to settle on Long Island close to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he was an adjunct professor, while writing up his thesis. After finalizing his thesis, he moved back to central Africa in February of 2001 to take up the post of project leader for ECOFAC, the European Union funded regional conservation program, in Lope, Gabon. His main function was to advise the Government in establishing its first national park. After the successful establishment of the Lope National Park in 2002, he once again joined WWF as a senior program officer in their Washington office, a post he has occupied since January 2004."


 * Steering Committee, Bushmeat Crisis Task Force

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