Dr Jürgen Blaser is Professor of International Forestry and Climate Change at Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland. Professor Blaser is a former Chair of the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and former Senior Forestry Advisor at the World Bank.Patrick Hardcastle is a Forestry Development Specialist who has worked in over 40 countries in the last 55 years. He started his career with 12 years in the Malawi Forestry Department, the last eight heading the Forestry Research Institute while specialising in silviculture and site classification. He followed this with 10 years of mainly post-graduate teaching at the Universities of Oxford and Aberdeen. Thereafter, he has been a consultant working with major bilateral and multilateral donors with a focus on forestry but increasingly also engaged with biodiversity conservation, climate change, economic and social equity within the broad framework of sustainable forest management.Alice Muchugi has over 20 years of experience in research on sustainable utilisation and conservation of tropical tree genetic resources. Since 2014, she is the Manager of Genetic Resource Unit at World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi where she coordinates the activities of the ICRAF seedbank in Nairobi and regional field genebanks to ensure that superior tree germplasm is available for ICRAF collaborative projects and other interested users. Formerly, Alice was a senior lecturer at the Kenyatta University where in addition to teaching Genetics, she mentored and supervised several graduate students. She has a PhD in Population Genetics from Kenyatta University, Kenya. She has published over 90 publications. Beth A. Kaplin is a Professor of Conservation Science in the College of Science & Technology at University of Rwanda (UR) and a Research Professor in the School for the Environment at University of Massachusetts-Boston (UMB). She is also a Senior Fellow at the Center of Global Governance and Sustainability at UMB. In June 2016 she was appointed Director of the Center of Excellence in Biodiversity & Natural Resource Management at UR. She also created the Regional Network for Conservation Educators in the Albertine Rift to support and empower conservation scientists in Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Tanzania, and Uganda. She is a member of the Society for Conservation Biology and the Association for Tropical Biology & Conservation, and formerly Associate Editor for the journal Biotropica. Professor Godwin Kowero is the Executive Secretary of the African Forest Forum and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences and the Tanzania Academy of Sciences. He has 20 years of experience in teaching in several universities in Tanzania, Mozambique and Kenya in the areas of policy analysis, forest economics, forest management and administration. He has had 10 years of international research in forestry with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), as a Senior Scientist and Regional Coordinator for Eastern and Southern Africa. He has over 80 peer reviewed publications, including chapters in books and books.
