Seience Biography
Amepou was born in Madang in 1988 and attended Holy Spirit Primary School, then Tushab Secondary School. [2] She studied at the University of Papua New Guinea and graduated in 2011 with a Bachelor of Science with a focus on marine biology. [3] After graduation from her BSc, during her honours year of study, she volunteered for the “Piku” project, a Canberra University research and conservation program to protect the endangered Papuan softshell turtle - Carettochelys insculpta. [3] The project was funded by ExxonMobil, which then funded her incomplete Master's degree at the Institute for Applied Ecology at the University of Canberra. [3] [4] In 2019 she was appointed Director of the Piku Biodiversity Network Inc., which emerged from the previous conservation programme. [5] [6] Human harvesting of the turtles is the major threat they face in Papua New Guinea, and Amepou's work encourages communities to self-impose no-harvest zones and to monitor turtle numbers to try to build sustainable populations. [7] [8]
In addition to her work on the project, she works and researches as a herpetologist. In 2015, alongside a team of Australian scientists, she described the new species Elseya rhodini and the subgenus Hanwarachelys within the genus Elseya as part of a revision of the species complex around the New Guinea snapping turtle Elseya novaeguineae . The research team worked on the entire species complex and, in addition to the newly described species, also raised Elseya schultzei , previously regarded as a synonym, to species status again. [9] In 2017 she was part of the team that established the Endangered status of the Papuan Softshell Turtle status for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). [10] In June 2019, she co-authored an article appeared on the status of the chytrid fungus ( Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis ), which is pathogenic in numerous amphibians. [11]
