Alison joined the CMSi team in 2021 as Business Development Consultant.

Alison is focussing on growing the international CMSi user community and ensuring that CMSi continues to evolve to meet the present and future needs of conservation managers.

She studied Tropical Environmental Science (BSc Hons) at Aberdeen University, and Conservation Biology (MSc) at the University of Cape Town. Her PhD, from the University of Leeds, involved developing modelling methods to assess the impacts of climate change and land use change upon biodiversity, and new methods for conservation planning through climate change.

While working at Princeton and Berkeley she led the development of Madagascar’s national biodiversity data-base and provided technical advice for a 4 million hectare expansion of Madagascar’s protected area network. At the Max Planck Institute she co-ordinated the early development and launch of www.movebank.org, a platform for management of animal movement data. She then became a lecturer in Climate Adaptation and Mitigation at Queens University Belfast, and more recently in Conservation at Bangor University.

Alison has worked overseas in the USA, Germany, Kenya, Madagascar, Uganda, Tanzania, and the Philippines. Her interests include horse riding, gardening, and exploring the world’s wilder places.