John Payne, PhD, is an ecologist who uses advanced analytical techniques to support wildlife conservation.

John's curiosity about wildlife and nature conservation was sparked by his childhood in a remote Patagonian field camp, where his parents studied whales. Later, he spent four years in Africa, living with Bushmen (Ju/wa) people in the Namibian Kalahari Desert and surveying nocturnal wildlife deep in the rainforest of Cameroon. He served as Asia Program officer for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - which took him to Laos, Papua New Guinea, and eastern Russia - and spent two years in Mongolia providing scientific guidance on a project to monitor the progress of a large copper and gold mine toward achieving a net-positive impact on biodiversity. His team used satellite telemetry and a vast aerial survey of the Mongolian Gobi Desert to track wildlife, estimate abundance, and model ecological and human factors impacting animals.

As the senior scientist for the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking program, John helped lead the deployment of an array of acoustic receivers that spanned the US West Coast for long-distance tracking of marine species; and he was a member of the team of scientists who founded the US national Animal Telemetry Network. He developed fisheries stock assessment and ecosystem and extinction risk models at the University of Washington and NOAA and ran an acoustic telemetry project to assess the impact of a proposed wave-energy installation in Oregon. Recently, he served as the director of science for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, designing shipboard science programs focused on combating illegal fishing.

John's current projects include developing a cloud-based AI workflow for analyzing large volumes of aerial survey images, with the goal of creating an inexpensive, simple, and robust system for use by wildlife departments in Africa.