My name is Tri Giyat Desantoro. My bachelor’s degree is in forestry from IPB Bogor, with a focus on forest resource conservation and ecotourism. I have worked in the field of sustainability for companies, especially for the management and monitoring of high conservation value areas and moved to an NGO for wildlife rescue, focused on orangutans in Kalimantan. There I gained new perspectives and richer experiences regarding human interactions with wildlife and landscape ecology and the policies used in its management.

Currently, I am continuing my Master’s degree related to tropical biodiversity conservation. I am interested in the application of big data in conservation and try to explore it, especially in the use of incident news as information that records the situation and perspective taken in the news. Although, I have to make explanations about the gap between incidents in reality and what information appears in news articles; Indonesian language, programming, landscape ecology, anthropology (ethnic-culture) and wildlife ecology are still my basic subjects that I continue to explore. My master’s research is about the distribution of orangutan and human interactions in Kalimantan through news articles. These same research methods are used in revealing the spread of the African Swine Fever outbreak in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries, and that made me join as an African Swine Fever research fellow.

I believe nature conservation is not about value measure but the way ancestors of local communities interacted with nature and passed on to their successors through oral culture the need to conserve and preserve nature.