Richard Schuster

Richard Schuster is the director of spatial planning and innovation at the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC). He is responsible for the development and implementation of NCC’s conservation planning framework, strategic conservation planning research efforts and new conservation technology initiatives.

Richard also provides leadership to improve best practices and skills for spatial planning practitioners, and to creatively respond to new and emerging conservation questions. His work incorporates a range of strategic conservation plan development, research, managerial and technical responsibilities.

Richard brings over 15 years of experience working on systematic conservation planning and spatial modelling for conservation purposes. He has developed innovative techniques to prioritize conservation areas and strategies and has a strong background in technology initiatives such as quantitative ecology and statistics; scientific software development and computing; big spatial data analysis; prioritization and optimization for conservation. Richard holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia in systematic conservation planning.