19th annual Whitley Awards

The 19th annual Whitley Awards Ceremony was held on 9 May 2012 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The flagship event of UK-based charity the Whitley Fund for Nature was hosted by writer and broadcaster John McCarthy, and saw seven conservation leaders from seven different countries receive Whitley Awards worth GBP 30,000 each in project funding over 1 year in support of their work. In addition, a special Whitley Gold Award was presented to 2004 Whitley Award winner Rodrigo Medellin of Mexico for his outstanding contribution to the conservation of bats in Latin America with the help of Continuation Funding from WFN. Over 400 people attended the event, where the charity's patron, HRH The Princess Royal, presented the Awards. The 2012 Whitley Award Winners are: Joanna Alfaro Shigueto, Peru (Conservation of threatened marine fauna through sustainable coastal fisheries); Inza Koné, Ivory Coast (Community-led conservation of Critically Endangered West African primates); Carlos Vasquez Almazan, Guatemala (Guatemala's first network of protected areas for amphibian conservation); Budiono, Indonesia (Protection of Indonesia's last population of freshwater dolphins); Josia Razafindramanana, Madagascar (Metapopulation management of Endangered crowned sifaka); Bernal Rodriguez Herrera, Costa Rica (Cross-border capacity building for conservation of Central American bats); Lisel Alamilla, Belize (Uniting stakeholders for the conservation of the Maya Golden Landscape). For more information on the Whitley Fund for Nature, the Whitley Awards and to view short films about each of the winning projects, see http://www.whitleyaward.org/. See p. 466 for the call for applications for the 2013 awards.