For years, Deepshikha Sharma has worked to strengthen the relationship between people in India and the snow leopards that live there. She’s built communities of wildlife champions that include women and children, and she’s brought more women to the forefront of conservation.
Thanks to the support of Catmosphere and their commitment to save big cats, we’re excited to announce that Deepshikha will join Conservation Nation as our newest fellow, working on a project to expand women’s conservation leadership in India!
“Women for Snow Leopards,” a project she will lead alongside the Snow Leopard Trust, will empower Indian women to lead the monitoring of local snow leopard populations. Monitoring work is vital for any conservation effort. It provides important information on population size and trends, and can help identify threats and evaluate how effective conservation efforts have been.
Camera-trapping work, however, has long been the domain of men. Deepshikha will build an all-women team to monitor snow leopards with camera traps, covering an area of about 100 square kilometers. She will train 10 women to set up cameras, monitor them, retrieve them, and participate in data entry. After the cameras are in hand, she will train the team to analyze the data – including teaching them to identify individual snow leopards.
But that’s just the beginning for this fledgling team of conservationists. As a follow-up to this one-year project, Deepshikha plans to have the team conduct population assessments over a much larger area and share their new skills and enthusiasm with others in the community – expanding the scope and reach of women in conservation!
This sort of work has long been important to Deepshikha – just as it’s important to Conservation Nation. Deepshikha, who has a master’s degree in development from Azim Premji University, Bangalore, and currently works as a program manager for the Nature Conservation Foundation, has spent years working with communities and policymakers to mitigate the adverse impacts of people living alongside snow leopards. She has sparked interest in conservation among children attending nature clubs; she leads a local newsletter that celebrates human-nature relations.
Deepshikha’s project won’t only empower local women – it will empower her. By leading “Women for Snow Leopards,” Deepshikha will have the opportunity to learn the science of the camera-trapping process, which she’s mostly observed from the outside. She will acquire this skill under the tutelage of the experienced Snow Leopard Trust team, which has been camera trapping for more than a decade.
That knowledge will filter down to the all-women team, creating a strong pipeline of wildlife champions doing great work to monitor the snow leopard population in India.
We’re so excited to welcome Deepshikha to our community of conservation champions, and can’t wait to see what she accomplishes in her fellowship!
Deepshikha Sharma is a Conservation Nation Fellow. Her fellowship is made possible with the support of Catmosphere, a foundation dedicated to raising awareness for crucial work in big cat conservation.
