Sospeter Mwirigi Kiambi

About

Sospeter is an ecologist at the Kenya Wildlife Service. He has worked in various field stations in Kenya and following several years of work with the Biodiversity Research and Planning Directorate, he is presently the National Elephant Program Coordinator and the head ecologist for Tsavo West and Chyulu National Parks. He has participated, and made presentations in various research conferences, including the Pan-African Vulture Summit (2012) and the United Nations Conference on space technology and applications for wildlife management and protecting biodiversity (2016).

Sospeter obtained a degree in Wildlife Conservation and Management from the University of Nairobi and MSc in Conservation and International Wildlife Trade from the University of Kent. In his MSc thesis, Sospeter hypothesized that the spatial-temporal changes in the distribution of African elephants were not affected by changes in the severity of poaching. In addition to confirming that indeed elephant distribution was affected by severity in poaching, his research also demonstrated the recovery process of an elephant population after exposure to poaching.

His PhD focuses on ‘Human-elephant co-existence in a post-ivory ban landscape.’ He will be developing spatially explicit future landscape scenarios for human and elephant population growth, and the wildlife viewing ecotourism potential for Africa, with an intention to identify potential human elephant conflict areas that could potentially benefit from ecotourism for local communities.

Supervision

Sospeter is supervised by Dr David Roberts, Professor Bob Smith, and Dr Mark Hampton in SAC, and Professor Iain Fraser in the School of Economics.