Russell A. Mittermeier is currently Chief Conservation Officer of Re:wild (formerly Global Wildlife Conservation). Among the other positions he has occupied, he was Vice-President for Science and Director of the Primate Program at WWF-US (1979-1989), President of Conservation International (1989-2014), and Executive Vice-Chair of Conservation International (2014-2017). Named a “Hero for the Planet” by TIME magazine in 1999, Mittermeier is widely regarded as a world leader in the field of biodiversity and tropical forest conservation. Trained as a primatologist and herpetologist, he has traveled widely to 169 countries on seven continents, and has conducted field work in more than 30 − focusing particularly on Amazonia (especially Brazil and Suriname), the Atlantic forest region of Brazil, and Madagascar.

He also has a long history with IUCN—going back to 1974—and was first inspired to investigate endangered species issues by the first editions of the Red Data Book in the 1960s. He has served as Chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group since 1977, building it into one of SSC’s largest SGs, and has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Species Survival Commission since 1982. He also served as an IUCN Regional Councillor for the period 2004−2012, was elected as one of IUCN’s four Vice-Presidents for the period 2009−2012, and then was elected a lifetime Honorary IUCN Member in 2012. In addition, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook since 1978 (and received an Honorary Doctorate there in 2007), a Research Associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for more than two decades, and President of the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation since 1996. He also led the first-ever Biodiversity Task Force at the World Bank in 1988, which introduced the term biodiversity to that institution. In 2009, together with Fred Launay, he was involved in the creation of the €25 million Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, a species-focused fund based in Abu Dhabi, and has served on its international advisory committee since it was created.

Mittermeier has been particularly influential in the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil, where he has worked since 1971, and in Madagascar, where he first began work in 1984. Another focus has been South America’s Guiana Shield region, the most pristine rain forest area left on Earth, where he began working in 1975. His vision for conservation in the Guianas—conserving over 20 million hectares of pristine forest from Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, the northernmost part of Brazilian Amazonia, and Venezuela—has been widely praised. Having worked in the region for 48 years, he has been able to win allies in many sectors, from heads-of-state to indigenous leaders, and has won a place for biodiversity conservation in government and community decision-making.

In 1986, Mittermeier created the concept of “Megadiversity Countries”, which recognizes that just 18 nations are responsible for more than two-thirds of all biodiversity—terrestrial, freshwater, and marine—a concept that has been picked up by several of the nations in this category. It also led to the independent creation of a “Like-minded Group of Megadiverse Countries” within the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At about the same time, he came up with the concept of “Major Tropical Wilderness Areas”, which later became known as “High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas”. He also has been the major proponent of the “Biodiversity Hotspots” concept, which was created by the late British ecologist Norman Myers in 1988 and immediately adopted by Mittermeier. Myers first published on 10 Hotspots, and then 18. Based on research conducted by Mittermeier and colleagues, the total has now grown to 36.

Over the course of his career, Mittermeier’s work has taken him to many different tropical rain forests around the world, to the point that he has now almost certainly been to more of these forests than anyone else ever.

Mittermeier has been particularly interested in the discovery and description of species new to science. He has described a total of 21 new species (three turtles, seven lemurs, four tarsiers, and seven monkeys) and has eight species named in his honor (three frogs, a lizard, two lemurs, a saki monkey, and an ant).

He has also been a leader in promoting species-focused ecotourism, particularly primate-watching and primate life-listing, based on the very successful model of the bird-watching community. To facilitate this, he launched a Tropical Field Guide Series and a Pocket Guide Series focused heavily on primates, but including a number of other species groups as well. Among the field guides published in the Tropical Field Guide Series are Lemurs of Madagascar (2010), and Primates of West Africa (2011), Lémuriens de Madagascar (2014), and Mammals of Madagascar (2021). The 5th edition of the lemur field guide was published in 2023, and field guides to primates of the Neotropical region, Asia, and Africa are now in preparation. His own primate life-list, now totaling more than 400 species, is almost certainly the largest in the world, and serves as a baseline for other primate life-listers. What is more, in April 2019, he became the first person in history to see all 83 primate genera in the wild. More recently, he has also started to promote turtle-watching and turtle life-listing, and in 2019 fulfilled one of ambitions, to see representatives of all turtle families in the wild and is now trying to see all turtle genera.

In addition, Mittermeier has had a lifelong interest in tribal peoples, and has worked with many different communities, from the Trio of southern Suriname and the Saramaccaner, Matawai, and Aucaner Maroons of central Suriname to the Kayapó, Kamayura and Ikpeng of Brazilian Amazonia, and has engaged them in a variety of different conservation endeavors. He has also published on the strong connections between biodiversity and human cultural and linguistic diversity, demonstrating how strongly the highest priority areas for each overlap.

Over the past 17 years, he has become involved in the climate change issue, in particular highlighting the importance of nature-based solutions to climate change and the critical role of tropical forests protection and restoration. He has helped to promote the concept of “avoided deforestation”, now better known as REDD (Reduction in Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), and particularly the very significant role of the High Forest Cover Low Deforestation Rate (HFLD) countries such as Suriname and Guyana.

Among the many honors he has received are the San Diego Zoological Society’s Gold Medal (1988), the Order of the Golden Ark of The Netherlands, from Prince Bernhard (1995), the Cincinnati Zoo Wildlife Conservation Award (1997), the Brazilian Muriqui Prize (1997), the Grand Sash and Order of the Yellow Star, Republic of Suriname, from President Jules Wijdenbosch (1998), the Order of the Southern Cross, from President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil (1998), the Aldo Leopold Award from the American Society of Mammalogists (2004), Sigma Xi’s John P. McGovern Science and Society Award (2007), the Sir Peter Scott Award of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission (2008), the Association of Tropical Biology’s Special Recognition Award for Conservation (2008), Harvard University’s Roger Tory Peterson Medal (2009), the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s João Pedro Cardoso Award (2011), and Instituto-E and the City of Rio de Janeiro’s E-Award (2012) in recognition of his conservation work. In 2016, he was elected to the American Association for Arts and Sciences (AAAS). In 2017, he was awarded the Centennial Award of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In 2018, he was awarded both the Behler Prize for his work in turtle conservation and the prestigious Indianapolis Prize, considered by some to be the “Nobel Prize for Species Conservation” for his lifelong achievements in his chosen field. Most recently, he received the International Award for Excellence in Conservation from the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) in 2020 and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the International Primatological Society in 2022.

In addition, Mittermeier has placed considerable emphasis on publishing. His output now includes 44 books and more than 750 scientific and popular articles. Among his books are the trilogy Megadiversity (1997), Hotspots (2000) and Wilderness (2002), and, more recently, Wildlife Spectacles (2003), Hotspots Revisited (2004), Transboundary Conservation (2005), Lemurs of Madagascar (1994; 2006; 2010), Pantanal: South America’s Wetland Jewel (2005), A Climate for Life (2008), The Wealth of Nature: Ecosystems, Biodiversity and Human Well-Being (2009), Freshwater: The Essence of Life (2010), Oceans: Heart of our Blue Planet (2011), Lémuriens de Madagascar (2014), Earth’s Legacy: Natural World Heritage (2015), A Geography of Hope (2016), Back from the Brink (2017), Islands (2018), and Nature’s Solutions to Climate Change (2019), Mammals of Madagascar (2021) Key Biodiversity Areas (2021), and All Asian Primates (2021). He is also an editor of Lynx Editions nine-volume series, Handbook of the Mammals of the World, the most comprehensive review to date of all the world’s mammal species, and the recently published two volume Checklist of the Mammals of the World (2020).

In addition to English, Mittermeier is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Sranan Tongo, the Creole language of Suriname, and is currently learning several others.

Mittermeier was born in New York City, grew up on Long Island, and went to college at Dartmouth, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1971. He did his graduate work at Harvard University, and received his doctorate in biological anthropology there in 1977 for a thesis entitled, “Distribution, Synecology, and Conservation of Suriname Monkeys”. Much of his early inspiration came from frequent visits as a child to the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History, and from the Tarzan books and movies, based on the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Mittermeier has been married twice and has three children, John, an ornithologist who completed his Ph.D. at Oxford and is now the Director of Threatened Species Outreach at the American Bird Conservancy in Washington D.C., Michael, a botanist living in Florida and one of the world’s authorities on aroid plants, and Juliana, a graduate at the University of Victoria in Canada.