Connor Walsh

International Engagement Officer

About me

I grew up near the Ramsar sites of County Wexford, where as a teenager I started working on habitat surveys, largely for windfarms. After studying Chinese in SOAS I lived in China, New Zealand, and Belgium, where I worked in radio and NGO communications. I formally retrained as a conservation scientist in 2016 and started at WWT in 2018.

My role

Most of my work is with voluntary partners outside WWT and the UK. I help the partners engage their local public and schoolchildren on the wonder and value of wetlands. The main networks I help are: the World Wetland Network, Wetland Link International and its Star Wetland Centre awards, and the East Atlantic Flyway initiative called Migratory Birds for People. I help find the knowledge and expertise of the networks and share it with others. Much of this is behind a computer screen, by video call, email, and social media, with occasional in-person meetings. Another very rewarding aspect of my job is supervising a capacity-building assistant role, akin to a paid internship, for young wetland professionals alongside their in-country roles.

Experience and interests

• Intermediate Mandarin
• Audio production

Publications

• Complementarity, completeness and quality of long-term faunal archives in an Asian biodiversity hotspot
• An Updated Citizen Science State of the World's Wetlands Survey