There are a handful of people whose life's work quietly reshapes the odds for an entire species. Dr. Sabine Schoppe is one of them, and this year the turtle conservation community gave her its highest honor because of it.

At the 24th Annual Symposium on the Conservation and Biology of Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles, the Behler/Pritchard Turtle Conservation Award Committee named Sabine — co-founder and director of the Katala Foundation in the Philippines — the 21st recipient of the Behler Turtle Conservation Award. Often called the "Nobel Prize" of turtle conservation, the award is co-presented by Turtle Survival Alliance, the IUCN/SSC Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group, Turtle Conservation Fund, and Turtle Conservancy, and is reserved for individuals who have made truly outstanding, career-defining contributions to protecting tortoises and freshwater turtles.

Sabine was unable to travel to Mexico for the ceremony this year, and the award was accepted on her behalf — a reminder that her work has never been a solo effort, but the product of a team she built and led for decades.

Three Decades in the Philippines

Sabine, a German conservation biologist, moved to the Philippines in 1995 after completing her Ph.D. in Biology at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. What began as ornithological surveys and coastal resource management work in the Visayas grew, over the following thirty years, into one of the most consequential conservation careers in the country's history.

In 1999 she joined the State Polytechnic College of Palawan (now Western Philippines University) as Guest Professor of Aquatic and Marine Biology. Over six years there, she built research capacity, formed partnerships that still stand today, and wrote freshwater turtle conservation into the university's curriculum for the first time — work she has continued as Adjunct Professor and as Associate Editor of The Palawan Scientist.

As a co-founder of the Katala Foundation, she first supported its Philippine Cockatoo Conservation Program, already internationally recognized for pulling that critically endangered species back from the edge. That success inspired her to start two programs of her own: the Philippine/Palawan Freshwater Turtle Conservation Program in 2007, and the Philippine/Palawan Pangolin Conservation Program in 2008.

A Lifeline for the Palawan Forest Turtle

It's the freshwater turtle program that we're proud to contribute to, and its story is really the story of one species being pulled back from the brink almost entirely through Sabine's persistence.

The Palawan Forest Turtle (Siebenrockiella leytensis) exists nowhere else on Earth. Before Sabine's program, it was barely studied and heavily trafficked. Under her leadership, Katala Foundation achieved what no one had before: the first protected area ever established specifically for this species, and the world's first successful conservation breeding program for it.

That work was tested in the most dramatic way possible in 2015, when close to 4,000 Palawan Forest Turtles were confiscated in one of the largest wildlife trafficking seizures ever recorded for the species. Sabine led the response — coordinating veterinarians and specialists from around the world, including teams from Turtle Survival Alliance and Turtle Conservancy, to rehabilitate thousands of turtles and return them to the wild. Out of that crisis, she built one of the only large-scale post-release monitoring programs for freshwater turtles anywhere in Asia, turning an emergency into lasting scientific knowledge. Her leadership through that ordeal earned her the 2015 Andrew Sabin Award for Excellence in Chelonian Conservation.

Her program's momentum hasn't slowed. This year, Turtle Conservancy-supported researchers at Katala Foundation completed fifteen field surveys across fourteen sites in northern Palawan — one of the most comprehensive recent assessments of the species, with early results showing that actively managed populations are faring better than those without protection. The program also marked a milestone in 2025 with the release of eighteen conservation-bred Palawan Forest Turtles into protected habitat, bringing the total number produced through the assurance colony program to seventy-four. It's the kind of steady, unglamorous progress — survey by survey, turtle by turtle — that has defined Sabine's entire career.

A Legacy Worth Honoring Now

The Behler Award exists to recognize the kind of person John Behler himself described: not committees or bureaucracies, but individuals who dedicate themselves, year after year, to saving a species almost no one else was paying attention to. Sabine has spent more than half her life doing exactly that — for the Philippine Cockatoo, for the Philippine Pangolin, and above all for the Palawan Forest Turtle, a species that would very likely not still exist in the wild without her.

We've been honored to walk alongside Sabine and the entire Katala Foundation team in that effort. To her, and to everyone who has worked at her side in Palawan over the past three decades: thank you, and congratulations on an honor that has been earned many times over.