If you are interested in developing a resource, have suggestions for content development, or know of resources already available, please contact the editor-in-chief or a board member.

Andrew M. Lemieux, Editor-in-Chief (LEAD Ranger)

Email: andrew@leadranger.org

Andrew Lemieux oversees content development for the Wilderness Problems resource portal with support from the editorial board. 

Lemieux manages LEAD Ranger’s Problem-Oriented Wildlife Protection program. The program’s purpose is to help government agencies and civil society organizations analyze wildlife protection problems and create holistic response plans that benefit wildlife and communities. Lemieux provides training and mentorship to help organizations establish problem-solving teams, solve problems, and write up their experiences as case studies. The program’s long-term vision is to create a body of evidence for decision makers and academics about ‘what works’ and ‘what fails’.

Lemieux was previously a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) where he coordinated the Wildlife Crime and Wilderness Problems research theme. He continues to collaborate with the NSCR as a research fellow. He holds a master’s in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from the University of Arizona and a doctorate in criminal justice from Rutgers University.

Jonathan Hunter

Jonathan Hunter served seven years in the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service before moving to Southeast Asia where he has been adapting his experience of front-line site-based enforcement to countering the illegal wildlife trade. During this time, Jonathan has developed bespoke information management systems for sites, and led problem-solving processes to develop preventative strategies for site based wildlife protection as well as capacity building in intelligence gathering and handling, safety protocols and enforcement management. 

Jennifer Mailley

Jen Mailley currently works at UNODC Vienna, where she oversees the research and data analysis work that feed into the UN’s Global Report on Wildlife Crime. She has over twenty years of experience in crime research and control, and previously worked as a senior analyst in the Crime and Policing Analysis Unit of the UK Home Office, as an academic, and project manager in South East Asia. Her experience in wildlife crime includes the use of problem-solving to address tiger poaching in Malaysia, hands-on capacity building for using forensic science in addressing wildlife crime, and developing a novel method for assessing the social and economic costs of wildlife crime by including natural capital costs.

Nerea Marteache (California State University San Bernardino)

Nerea Marteache is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, and the Assistant Director of the Center for Criminal Justice Research at California State University San Bernardino. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. Her research interests and scholarship focus on crime prevention through opportunity reduction, and on the analysis and evaluation of criminal justice policy. She received the Promising Young Scholar Award in 2010 from the Sociedad Española de Investigación Criminológica, and the Young Criminologist Award in 2013 from the European Society of Criminology. Her recent scholarly work includes projects on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and forest crime, as well as on other topics such as employee theft and crime in transportation systems.

William Moreto (University of Central Florida)

Twitter: @MoreToPhD

Website: www.conservationcrimescience.com

William D. Moreto is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice in 2013. He is a research associate of the Rutgers Center for Conservation Crime Science. His research centers on the study of wildlife crime, wildlife law enforcement, conservation rangers, situational crime prevention, and corruption. He has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Nepal, the Philippines, Uganda, and the United States, and has collected primary data from over 30 countries. His research can be found in leading journals, including Justice Quarterly, British Journal of Criminology, Qualitative Research, Biological Conservation, and Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation. He is the lead author of Wildlife Crime: An Environmental Criminology and Crime Science Perspective (Carolina Academic Press) and editor of Wildlife Crime: From Theory to Practice (Temple University Press). 

Gohar Petrossian (John Jay School of Criminal Justice) 

Dr. Gohar Petrossian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, and the Director of the International Crime and Justice Master’s Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Dr Petrossian’s research focuses on testing the application of environmental criminology and opportunity theories of crime, with a particular focus on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. She has published over two dozen scholarly articles and book chapters on the topic of wildlife trafficking and IUU fishing. She is the author of the book The Last Fish Swimming: The Global Crime of Illegal Fishing (Global Crime and Justice Series. ABC-CLIO, LLC, Praeger Imprint) published in 2019. In 2015, Dr Petrossian was invited by the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research and the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement to attend the Globalization of Fisheries Conference in Texel and present her research on the spatial patterns of illegal fishing across the Western African coastline. In 2019, Dr Petrossian was hired as a fisheries crime expert and consultant by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Vienna office) to evaluate the FishNET project implemented by the organization in Africa and Southeast Asia. In 2020, she was invited by the National Science Foundation as a reviewer and panelist to evaluate grant proposals that relate to the issue of illegal wildlife crime. Dr Petrossian’s work has been featured by Global Fishing Watch (A Google, Oceana, and Leonardo Di Caprio Foundation initiative), Yale University’s Environment Review, National Geographic, PBS Nature, and CUNY Newswire. 

Robert Pickles (Panthera)

Rob Pickles is the Regional Coordinator for Counter-Wildlife Crime in South and Southeast Asia for Panthera, an NGO specialising in wild cat protection. Rob closely supports counter-poaching teams in protected areas in Asia, developing knowledge management systems, refining understanding of the specifics of different poaching problems and designing interventions to counter these. His interests run from fine scale counter-poaching tactics to larger scale strategic design, synthesising and applying lessons from diverse, resource limited, problem control disciplines in remote areas. Rob earned a PhD in ecology from the University of Kent and Zoological Society of London in 2010 and is an honorary research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement.

Stephen Pires (Florida International University) 

Website: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stephen-Pires 

Stephen Pires, PhD, is an associate professor in the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He studies the illegal wildlife trade with a particular focus on commonly-poached species (i.e. hot products), illicit markets, & the organization of the illegal trade. His work has appeared in Biological Conservation, Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, The British Journal of Criminology, Bird Conservational International, and Forest Policy & Economics. In addition, he has co-authored the book, “Wildlife Crime: An Environmental Criminology and Crime Science Perspective” and co-edited the book, "Quantitative Studies in Green and Conservation Criminology." 

Julie Viollaz

Julie Viollaz works as the Wildlife Crime Research Officer for the Crime Research Section of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Prior to this, she was a research associate at Michigan State University and worked as a consultant on wildlife crime issues. She has a Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the CUNY Graduate Center & John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a B.A. in Biology from Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in field interventions to help communities, law enforcement personnel, and NGOs apply crime prevention techniques to poaching and wildlife trafficking. She was part of the team that conducted the 2016 mid-term evaluation of USAID’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (Phase III) in the Congo Basin and has worked with a range of government agencies and NGOs including the World Wildlife Fund, Fauna & Flora International, Global Wildlife Conservation, the United Nations, INTERPOL, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. State Department, and the New York City Police Department.