Professor Erik Meijaard

Prof. Erik Meijaard has been working on the intersection of South-East Asian conservation science and practice since the early 1990s. His academic background is in environmental sciences and tropical ecology and he has a PhD in biological anthropology. Much of Erik’s research work has focused on the island of Borneo, with orangutans and wild pigs as primary research objects.  

In 2011, Dr Meijaard initiated the Borneo Futures – Science for Change programme that implements research with a specific goal of changing public perceptions and policies on land and natural resource-use and wildlife conservation in Borneo. The studies conducted under this programme range widely from evolutionary and taxonomic studies to land-use optimisation and community forest management. Communication of research findings through newspaper articles has had tangible impacts on Indonesian policies. In 2017, Erik set up the IUCN Oil Palm Task Force, which he co-chairs. 

Dr Meijaard has collaborated with the University of Kent since 2006, primarily through research with Dr Matthew Struebig. This concerned studies of oil palm and biodiversity, bat conservation and biogeography, climate change, species distribution modelling, and community forest management.  

Other collaborations have focused more on the social sciences including recent studies of the social welfare and poverty impacts of oil palm development and certification, and community forestry. An interesting collaboration with Dr Rajindra Puri and others resulted in a paper recently being published that brought together anthropologists and conservation scientists.  

Dr Meijaard’s current research focus is on citizen science-based biodiversity monitoring. He has led a 6-year pilot study in Indonesian oil palm in which some 4,000 palm oil workers collected nearly 200,000 wildlife observations. More recently, he initiated a community-led initiative in 9 villages in remote parts of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. This approach uses payments for verified wildlife observations, generating large data volumes that support statistically robust occupancy estimates of selected species. These citizen science methods are cheap, and importantly create major local buy-in for wildlife monitoring and also management, because people consider wildlife an asset they want to protect. 

Selected Publications

• Meijaard, E., et al., 2024. Exploring the future of vegetable oils. Oil crop implications - Fats, forests, forecasts, and futures. IUCN and SNSB, Gland, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.2305/KFJA1910. (translated into Indonesian, French and Spanish). 
• van Strien AJ, Meijaard E, Nardiyono, Suief S, Zaini S. 2026. Occupancy estimation of wild species in a palm oil plantation using unstructured data. PLOS ONE. 21:e0328960. 
• Frantz, L. et al., 2026. Genomic analyses reveal the complex histories of pig translocation across Wallacea and the Pacific. Science. 
• Flannery T.F,, Koungoulos L.G., Meijaard E,, Yohanita A., Muharmansaya A,, AlZaqie I,, Aplin, K., Korain, F., Mjam, M., Helgen K.M.H, 2026. New Genus of Hemibelidine Possum (Pseudocheiridae: Marsupialia) from New Guinea and Australia including a Lazarus taxon from Vogelkop. Records of the Australian Museum. 
• Meijaard, E. and Sheil, D. 2025. No Oil Crop Is Inherently Bad — But Our Thinking Might Be. Cell Reports Sustainability.