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Meet our team
Joni Overbosch
MEL and Strategy Lead, Lion Landscapes
Joni is the MEL and Strategy Lead at Lion Landscapes, where she works to ensure the organisation's conservation programmes are grounded in rigorous, locally adapted evidence and clear strategic thinking. She joined as a volunteer in September 2020, having left her previous job with no fixed plan beyond finding work she genuinely cared about. A chance volunteer listing, posted just as Lion Landscapes was forming through the merger of the original organisation with the Ruaha Carnivore Project, offered exactly that. Having previously travelled through both Ruaha and Laikipia, Joni took on what was meant to be a three-month placement and has been with the organisation ever since.
Her role has evolved considerably over the past several years. She currently leads the implementation of the Conservation Standards framework across Lion Landscapes' programmes, and drafts formal results chains and monitoring plans that trace how the organisation's interventions address the threats facing large carnivores, their wild prey, and the functional habitat that sustains them, as well as the threats to the wellbeing of the people who share the landscape with them. This work underpins the organisation's ability to demonstrate impact against its mission of making large carnivore conservation valuable to the people who live alongside it, and feeds directly into overall organisational strategy.
Outside work, Joni travels widely, with particular fondness for Namibia and East Africa. She has a particular soft spot for birds, arthropods and reptiles, and logs her sightings on iNaturalist wherever she goes.