Steffi Dekegel

Biography

Steffi Dekegel is a joint PhD candidate at UCLouvain, the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz (Brazil), and the Antwerp Zoo Centre for Research and Conservation (CRC). Her interdisciplinary research explores trade-offs between biodiversity conservation and rural livelihoods in the cocoa-producing landscape of southern Bahia, Brazil. She holds a Master’s degree in Biology: Biodiversity, Conservation and Restoration from the University of Antwerp (2018). 

Before her PhD, she worked at CRC on an EU-funded research project evaluating the applicability of Copernicus Climate Change Service data for biodiversity conservation, with a focus on climate impacts and conservation planning for an endangered primate in Brazil. Her research and fieldwork have taken her to several countries. In Cameroon, she studied how human activity affects mammal communities in and around the Dja Biosphere Reserve. In South Africa, she supported a research project aimed at mitigating human–primate conflict on farms. These experiences sparked her interest in the complex relationship between human needs and biodiversity conservation, a focus that now drives her PhD research. In Brazil, she carried out ecological surveys and household interviews with cocoa farmers. To engage more effectively with local communities, she learned Portuguese, adding to her fluency in Dutch, French, and English.