Sabine Schoppe

Sabine is a German biologist who has pursued her studies and work in the tropics. After finishing her PhD in marine ecology in Colombia in 1993, she started working in the Philippines in 1995, with studies also in Indonesia and Malaysia. She first worked on community-based marine resource management before returning to academics at Western Philippines University on the island of Palawan, where she taught marine and freshwater biology and ecology for six years. Her interests at that time gradually evolved towards freshwater habitats and she started working on Palawan’s freshwater turtles, notably the Palawan Forest Turtle, Siebenrockiella leytensis, a species which at the time had not yet been officially rediscovered. Ever since, for the last 20 years, Sabine has dedicated her life and time to the conservation of the Palawan Forest Turtle and other species sharing the island’s threatened lowland forest habitats, including Palawan’s other native freshwater turtles. Since 2007 she has worked fulltime for Katala Foundation Inc. (KFI), a Palawan-based NGO working on the conservation of highly threatened species, and she heads KFI’s Palawan Freshwater Turtle Conservation Program (PFTCP). In 2015 she successfully organized the massive rescue operation and rehabilitation of some 4,000 confiscated Palawan Forest Turtles and coordinated the many international turtle experts and contributors, including staff from Turtle Conservancy, that came to help and make the rescue a success. Since 2018, Sabine has also been running a successful conservation breeding assurance colony for the Palawan Forest Turtle.