The School of Wildlife Conservation (SOWC) is working in collaboration with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission on an exciting research project looking at the scale and potential of the wildlife economy in Africa. As part of this project the SOWC and the JRC are contributing to GD-PAVIS (Global Database-Protected Areas Visitation) and a related publication. The database contains spatial information on protected area visitor monitoring data, such as the number of visitors, visitor spending and economic contributions of tourists and local visitors to protected areas.

Three ALU student research interns are supporting the SOWC and JRC team to collect, collate and analyse data from various African countries to be included into GD-PAVIS. The work includes gathering relevant data, reviewing the visitor monitoring methodologies of data collection and linking the collected data to GIS shapefiles of the related protected areas (find more details on GD-PAVIS data here: https://rris.biopama.org/visitor-reporting).