Meet The Team

I am an MRes student at UCL, studying the effects of predation pressure on the chimpanzees here at Issa. Specifically, I want to explore whether predators (mostly leopards, also wild dogs and hyenas) affect the chimpanzees' space use throughout the landscape. By combining data from camera traps and daily focal follows, I hope to quantify the spatial pressure exerted by these predators, which can create a "landscape of fear" and induce avoidance of certain areas by chimpanzees. This project will provide insights on the predator-prey dynamics of chimpanzees as prey and help inform theories on how predation pressure may have influenced early human evolution.

Aquinna Murphy previously worked at a chimpanzee sanctuary in the United States and is now a master’s student in Primate Conservation at Oxford Brookes University. She is doing her dissertation work at GMERC, where she is researching the social responses of the Issa chimpanzees to multiple adult male mortalities in the last few years. 

My name is Wiske Bovee and I studied Forestry at Van Hall Larenstein, the Netherlands. I first came to Issa in 2023 as an intern where I mainly assisted in butterfly and mushroom studies. I am very happy to be back here, this time as research advisor and to pursue a project exploring mycorrhizal symbiosis