Joleen Broadfield
South Africa, France
Conservationist, Panthera
After travelling in Europe and Oceania, she settled in South Africa where she left the tourism industry to take an unconventional, unacademic, path back to her first passion : conservation. She participated in different projects researching factors contributing to human-wildlife conflict, particularly with respect to meso and large carnivores. First as a field assistant in a study testing non-lethal predator-human conflict mitigation measures in Namaqualand, South Africa, she learnt valuable field skills, targeting leopard (Panthera pardus), black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) and caracal (Caracal caracal).
She then joined the Urban Caracal Project where she grew as the project field team manager, honing her trapping skills for a study evaluating the influence of urbanization on the movement ecology and population genetics of caracals (Caracal caracal) within a biodiversity hotspot, the Cape Peninsula, South Africa.
Finally she joined Panthera’s Leopard Program in 2017, monitoring biological camera trap surveys within South Africa as well as assisting with the data processing. Again pushing herself out of her comfort zone, she became an integral part of Panthera’s Integrated Conservation Program, diving in the crux of data science. Today she has find the perfect match, joining her learnings from the Data Science Program to a interest of hers : Small Cats. She is now a Data Scientist at Panthera’s Small Cats Program, managing data for no less than 33 species from studies all around the global.
After 10 years in South Africa, she just recently moved to the French Alps, where she can be found rock climbing or trail running on her spare time, that is when she isn’t tracking some red fox tracks or observing royal eagles.