Prof. Dr. Margaret Owuor has been appointed President-Elect of the Society for Conservation Biology Africa Region Board, a role she will use to advance integrative biodiversity conservation science and strengthen collaboration across African conservation institutions.

The Society for Conservation Biology’s Africa Region Board has appointed Prof. Dr. Margaret Owuor, the lead of our Integrative Biodiversity Conservation Science team, as its next President-Elect. The appointment, dated 23 January 2026, recognizes her contribution to conservation science and her role in convening people and institutions around shared questions of biodiversity loss and restoration.

For Prof. Owuor, the appointment creates a platform to push forward discussions on integrative biodiversity conservation science, and to deepen collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and institutions working on conservation across the African continent. She also sees it as an opportunity to strengthen coalitions that recognize Africa’s biodiversity richness while also supporting approaches led by regional expertise.

These themes run through our recent video interview with her. In the interview, Margaret reflects on how growing up in Kenya’s lake region shaped her interest in aquatic systems, and how her work has continued to focus on the interacting drivers of biodiversity loss—climate change, land use change, pollution, and other pressures that compound across scales. She describes integrative work as bringing disciplines and stakeholders together to ask practical questions: what is driving change in a given landscape, what solutions are feasible, and what improves when ecosystems recover.

Prof. Owuor also notes why collaborations between institutions in the Global South and Global North matter, but also why they need to translate into opportunities that stay rooted in place: supporting researchers who cannot travel, building institutional partnerships that enable training and mentorship locally, and widening who gets to contribute to conservation debates and decisions. In that sense, her SCB appointment is less a departure than a continuation: another space to connect field-grounded evidence with the coalitions and institutions needed to sustain change.