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Mahendra Shrestha, Ph.D. - Director Save The Tiger Fund
Mahendra Shrestha is the
director of the Save The Tiger Fund (STF) at the National Fish and
Wildlife Foundation.
 Born and raised in a small village
of farmers in Nepal, Dr. Shrestha joined the Forest Service, and later the
National Parks Service in Nepal. While
working for the Government
of Nepal and various nongovernmental
organizations, Dr. Shrestha has gained extensive experience on conservation issues
ranging from the management of national parks to community-based
conservation and policy making.
Training ground level staff for
monitoring wildlife species, resolving human-wildlife conflict,
conservation-awareness raising, and public participation in conservation
to benefit both wildlife and local communities are a few of the
conservation issues Dr. Shrestha has focused on in the past. His work in
taking wildlife conservation beyond the boundaries of parks and reserves
to achieve landscape-level conservation led Dr. Shrestha to complete his
Ph.D. research entitled “Relative Abundance in a Fragmented
Landscape: Implications for
Tiger Conservation” at the University of Minnesota. This research provided baseline information on landscape patterns,
corridors and connectivity, prey abundance and tiger distribution for
the Terai Arc Landscape Conservation Project, which STF is now
supporting. He also conducted field work in parts of tiger landscapes
in India and Bangladesh.
Trained as a forester
in India with a Columbo Plan scholarship, Dr.
Shrestha went on to be a Fulbright scholar while earning his masters at the
University of Wisconsin. Dr. Shrestha now uses his
experience in Nepal, India and other parts of the
tiger’s range
for the Save The Tiger Fund. He strongly believes in partnership
and consensus building to reach the common goal of tiger
conservation.
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