National Selection Committee

Jan van der Ploeg is an environmental anthropologist working on community-based conservation, environmental crime and ecological restoration. Over the past 20 years, he worked in insular Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean on the intersection of science, policy, and conservation. In 2003 he co-founded the Mabuwaya Foundation, an organization dedicated to the in-situ conservation of the critically endangered…

Gabriella is a conservation biologist who has mainly been working in South East Asia for the past 30 years. She finalized her PhD on the effects of El Niño and forest fires on the ecology of sun bears in Indonesian Borneo and worked on developing multi-stakeholder management of protected areas and adding forest to the protected area network in Sumatra. Gabriella…

Dr. Pita Verweij is an associate professor at Utrecht University. Her specialties are: vegetation ecology, tropical ecology, ecological modelling, environmental valuation, business & biodiversity, natural resources management, bioenergy, GIS, remote sensing. Dr. Pita Verweij worked in a wide range of tropical ecosystems, from lowland forests to mountain grasslands, and from semi-arid to extremely humid. 

Kees is a retired marine biologist, with a career in international sustainable fisheries and ocean wildlife conservation.  

Hans de Iongh has been a member of the Board of the Netherlands Committee for IUCN since 1987 and has been a Chair of the Committee between 1990 and 2000 and a Vice Chair from 2000 until 2003. Since 2003, he has been a member of the Supervisory Board of IUCN NL and Biodiversity Advisor to the…