Lucy Keith-Diagne, Ph.D.
- Title
- Founder and Executive Director
- Institution
- African Aquatic Conservation Fund
- Country
- Senegal
- [email protected]
- Award year
- 2017
Research
Coastal conservation of the African manatee in West and Central Africa
Lucy Keith-Diagne, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the African Aquatic Conservation Fund, which supports manatee conservation programs throughout West and Central Africa. She has trained more than 100 people from 19 countries in manatee conservation and has established a network to encourage ongoing research and collaboration across the region.
African manatees (Trichechus senegalensis) face significant threats throughout their range, which extends along Africa’s western coast from southern Mauritania to central Angola. The species is believed to be in decline, but reliable data on its distribution, biology, and ecology are scarce. Although all of the countries where African manatees can be found have laws to protect them, those conservation measures are not effectively enforced. The species is illegally hunted almost everywhere it occurs, and other threats include incidental bycatch by artisanal fisheries, dams, and habitat loss because of human development.
Keith-Diagne used her Pew marine fellowship to collect much-needed data on manatee population genetics, ecology, and health and to measure species mortality associated with illegal hunting, incidental taking, and coastal development across five countries in Central and West Africa: Senegal, the Gambia, Nigeria, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She worked with government wildlife agencies, conservation groups, and local stakeholders to build research and management capacity among African conservationists. Keith-Diagne also helped create alternative livelihoods for individuals engaged in manatee hunting by establishing programs that retrain them as fish farmers and as rangers for manatee reserves, and in 2021 led the First African Manatee Symposium to disseminate research results for the species.
To learn more about Keith-Diagne, read her bio.
See the full list of 2017 Pew marine fellows.