In our second installment presenting our 2009 Faces of Conservation, we would like to introduce Beatrice 'Betty' Buyu, the new director of African Conservation Centre, our partner in Nairobi. Betty has also joined the board of directors of African Conservation Fund. A graduate of Biochemistry and Zoology from Nairobi University, Betty has acquired a great deal of experience from both private and public sectors. Her career started at East Africa Industries, an affiliate Unilever organization, where she held various responsibilities in both the technical and marketing fields.  From there she worked with other Blue Chip multinationals such as British American Tobacco and Sterling Health (now GlaxoSmithKline) as Marketing Director for the Kenyan companies.

African Conservation Fund and African Conservation Centre co-founder Dr. David Western reports on 40 years of research on fossil bone assemblages in Amboseli - and how it's used to reconstruct animal community structure, something that can help conservationists today. 

Abstract: Reconstructing ancient communities depends on how accurately fossil assemblages retain information about living populations. We report a high level of fidelity between modern bone assemblages and living populations based on a 40-year study of the Amboseli ecosystem in southern Kenya. Relative abundance of 15 herbivorous species recorded in the bone assemblage accurately tracks the living populations through major changes in community composition and habitat over intervals as short as 5 years.

In the first of our series of stories introducing you to our Faces of Conservation, we present our latest board chairman, Bill Yancey, and his wife, Eva. After half a dozen trips to East Africa, their passion for the places, wildlife, and people has only increased - so much so that they have dedicated a good deal of their personal time out from their busy lives to help community-based conservation efforts in Kenya and Tanzania. Swedish born and raised in Los Angeles, Eva is a dental surgeon, while native Los Angelean Bill is Assistant Dean and Director of UCLA's Continuing Dental Education and Alumni Affairs. 

"After visiting Kenya and Tanzania for 4 months in my early years, I was anxious to take my wife there in the early 90s to see if she would be as charmed as I was. After our first visit together, it was obvious she was equally enthralled.  Eva and I fell in love with the incredible wildlife, the varied landscapes, and the warm and friendly people. It's truly a life-changing experience. We have returned to Tanzania and Kenya almost every other year since then, and find that we enjoy it more and more each time. Over those years we came to understand that underlying the beauty and majesty of the wildlife and open landscapes, there are many challenges facing the future preservation of these things we love so dearly . . .