Haqiq Rahmani

ESI Data & GIS Specialist, and WCS Conservation Ecologist

Haqiqurahman Rahmani completed his PhD in interdisciplinary ecology with the Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation with a concentration in wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science from the Graduate School of Management in Computer Science, Peshawar, Pakistan and an M.S. in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from the University of Leeds in the UK. His doctoral dissertation research was focused on snow leopard space use, distribution, movement patterns and habitat selection in the central Asian mountains. In the year 2016, Haqiq was awarded the prestigious WCS graduate scholarship, Robertson Big Cat Conservation Fellowship. He was the first Afghan citizen to win the Society for Conservation (SCGIS) Scholarship award. Haqiq has more than 15 years of experience in conservation, GIS, remote sensing, and data analysis.

Previously, Haqiq was the head of the Geospatial team for the Wildlife Conservation Society program in Afghanistan. He collaborated with the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) and the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) on projects that were key to the development of Afghanistan's national protected area system plan as well as the creation of the first two national parks in the country.

Haqiq works on the Extinction Solutions Index (ESI) where he serves as the Data & GIS Specialist, integrating spatial work at WCS into the ESI research design as a part of their collaborative partnership. Haqiq uses his expertise to integrate WCS's advancements in mapping human impacts on the landscape and CXL's ESI program to prioritize and rank solutions to the extinction crisis. As a joint CXL-WCS collaborative researcher, he will work to advance the organizations' goals to develop and operationalize a framework capturing threat severity of the drivers of extinction, the impact humans have on the landscape, and the potential effects of an action on extinction avoidance and biodiversity recovery.