Dr Daniel Pouakouyou was trained in forestry and wildlife management and for nearly 16 years, has worked relentlessly on various aspects of conservation and sustainable use of forest biodiversity. He has a blend of experience working with government bureaucracies, bilateral and multilateral biodiversity conservation projects, consultancy companies and currently with an international environmental NGO. He is at his best when he works to bring these different groups together to tackle complex biodiversity conservation management problems. From 2003, he joined the UK-based international environmental NGO Fauna & Flora International as Africa Programme Officer, a position that involved managing existing FFI biodiversity projects in Nigeria and Cameroon as well as establishing new ones throughout the region. It also entailed providing technical inputs on work undertaken by the Africa Programme as a whole including general support to project cycle management, review of funding applications, project documents and technical manuscripts. A key challenge in his work has been to promote forest biodiversity conservation and management ethos that combines the need to preserve viable and ecologically functional forest ecosystems and the species of fauna and flora within it in tandem with the livelihood concerns of the forest poor. This is being achieved through the promotion of the sustainable consumptive use and the non consumptive use of forest biodiversity. After a year he was promoted programme manager, a role which extended his responsibilities to include FFI projects in Guinea (Conakry) and particularly at the Nimba Mountain World Heritage Site. In this region and elsewhere, he works in partnership with extractive industries such as the mining companies Rio Tinto Plc and the Euronimba Consortium as well as other stakeholders to promote the conservation of biodiversity through an integrated and participatory management approach. He is fully aware of the adverse impacts that a sudden increase in household revenues as a result of mining operations and other forest related activities can cause on biodiversity and has been working with all concerned to provide guidelines on how critical habitats and species of wild fauna and flora can be best preserved while improving the livelihood of the local communities. Between 1999 and 2003, he undertook doctoral research on the threatened medicinal Afromontane tree species Prunus Africana (Hook .f.) Kalkman, interspersing this work with specific assignments as freelance consultant. During this period, he co-ordinated field activities for the DFID funded research on the assessment of the values assigned to forest habitats and forest resources by the local communities on Mount Cameroon. He provided technical advices to the FAO led project on developing guidelines for Non Wood Forest Products inventory in Sub-Saharan Africa. He also contributed to the development of a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation toolkit for project leaders in the DFID funded Natural Resources Systems Programme based on case study resource materials from Brazil and Cameroon. After a brief stay at the Cameroon Ministry of the Environment and Forestry where he worked on a number of forestry policy issues in 1993, he moved to establish himself as a natural resource management specialist and researcher for the Mount Cameroon Project (MCP) between 1994 and 1998. MCP was a biodiversity conservation project funded by the Government of Cameroon, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the German Technical Development Agency (GTZ) and the World Bank Global Environment Facilities. As the leading member of a multidisciplinary team in this project, he worked on programme development, participatory planning and the active involvement of local communities and other stakeholders in the sustainable management of forest biodiversity. He guided setting user group federations and agreeing sustainable off-take quotas of wild resources from the forest with all concerned. An essential corollary of this work was to undertake comprehensive forest biodiversity resource assessments in the different ecological and policy contexts, combining both classical and participatory inventory methods. Daniel Pouakouyou is a member of the Governing Council of the Commonwealth Forestry Association and a member of the Community Based Natural Resource Management Network.