Bayarmaa Chuluunbat

In Mongolia’s vast Gobi, where two people live in every square kilometer, most poaching, disease outbreaks, and human–wildlife conflict happen far beyond any witness. My work aims to make these invisible losses visible and transform that knowledge into protection for both wildlife and communities. 

As a wildlife ecologist and conservationist, I lead field projects on snow leopards, Mongolian saiga, khulan, gazelles, Dalmatian pelicans, and now cinereous vultures. Across these landscapes, I create tools to answer urgent questions: Where are animals dying? Why? And how can we intervene before the next loss?

Through Sky Rangers, I am developing a new boundary-pushing early-warning system. By equipping vultures with GPS, accelerometers, and cameras, we can detect carcasses in near real time, identify illegal hunting hotspots, and guide rangers to places that were previously unreachable. But technology alone is not enough. I work closely with herders, rangers, and youth to turn these signals into local action, anti-trap campaigns, improved livestock protection, and wildlife-friendly community practices.

My hope reaches beyond any single species or device. I envision Mongolia becoming the first country where wildlife mortality is no longer invisible: where biologging, community knowledge, and policy form a unified national surveillance system that protects animals before they disappear. If we can prove this approach in the Gobi, it can become a global model, empowering other countries to see, understand, and prevent hidden losses long before they become irreversible.

I grew up in a remote corner of western Mongolia, in a nomadic herder family from the Zakhchin minority. For us, the snow leopard is not only a species, but a presence woven into our stories, our mountains, and our identity. When I was five, herding livestock with my father, I saw one for the first time, silent, effortless, completely wild. My father said, “When the snow leopard takes livestock, it only takes what belongs to it.” That was my first conservation lesson: respect instead of fear, coexistence instead of blame.

A decade later, I encountered another snow leopard, but this one had a steel trap crushing its leg. I remember thinking, “If this were my mother’s leg, how much pain would she feel?” In that moment, conservation stopped being a distant value and became a responsibility I could not ignore.

At twelve, I founded the Saiga Eco-Club at my school and helped launch Mongolia’s first youth-led anti-trap campaign. We walked from door to door, exchanging household goods for traps and talking with families about wildlife. Over three years, we collected more than 1,500 traps, contributed to the first provincial ban on their use, and helped reduce wildlife injuries. The club continues today under new student leaders.

That experience shaped everything that followed. I learned that conservation is strongest when it begins with the people who share land with wildlife, and that even young voices can shift mindsets and policy. I do this work because I grew up in a world where humans and wild animals depend on one another, and because I want future children to meet a snow leopard with wonder, not with the memory of suffering.