Kalyar Platt

Kalyar Platt (born June 2, 1972 in Rangoon , Burma ) is a Burmese ecologist and conservationist .

Life

Platt is the daughter of Daw San San and U Nyunt Thein. As a young girl, she often accompanied her father, a government civil engineer , to the construction sites of hydropower dams, where workers collected turtles and threw them into large pits for food. Initially fascinated by the diversity of the species, she was soon appalled when she saw the camp cook butchering the turtles alive. This early confrontation with unnecessary cruelty was a key experience for her that would shape her career path.

Platt grew up in Yangon (formerly Rangoon) and studied at the University of Yangon , where she received a Bachelor of Science with honors in 1995 and a Master of Science of Science in 2000 . In 1999 she met her future husband, the American herpetologist and conservationist Steven G. Platt , whom she married in 2004. Knowing that the universities in Myanmar could be closed at any time by the ruling military junta and in the hope of studying abroad, Platt moved to Bangkok , where she worked for the Wildlife Conservation Society's Thailand program . Shortly thereafter, she was in the graduate program of the University of Chulalongkorn added, where they, under the direction of the Thai biologist 2007 Kumthorn Thirakhupt with a thesis on the ecology of the Southern Batagur ( Batagur affinis ) to the doctor received his doctorate. After graduating, she moved to the United States, where her husband accepted a teaching position at Sul Ross State University in Alpine , Texas . Since there were no job opportunities for Kalyar Platt in Alpine, she moved to her sisters in Wingdale , New York , and took a lucrative job on an orchid farm . In 2010, Platt returned to her home country, where she became director of the Myanmar program of the Turtle Survival Alliance . A few months later her husband followed as a herpetologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Southeast Asia.

Platt oversees conservation, rearing, and reintroduction projects for some of Southeast Asia's rarest turtle species. Her first success was the reintroduction of the Burmese tortoise ( Geochelone platynota ). To this end, she organized a national conservation workshop and, together with the participants, developed an action plan that describes how and where this iconic species can be reintroduced. Following the implementation of the action plan, approximately 1000 Burmese tortoises were successfully released into the Minzontaung Wildlife Sanctuary by 2017. Another project is the preservation of the Burmese roof turtle ( Batagur trivittata ) from extinction. Since it was rediscovered in 2002, twelve adult wild animals of this species have lived in the Shwe Settaw Wildlife Sanctuary on the Chindwin River. Platt started monitoring and supervised the collection of the eggs. A breeding program was set up at Mandalay Zoo and the first juvenile turtles were released into the wild in 2015. In 2009, along with her husband, she was part of a team of scientists who, after almost ten years of searching, succeeded in rediscovering a population of wild specimens of the endangered flat turtle ( Heosemys depressa ) in an elephant reserve in the Arakan-Joma Mountains in Myanmar.

In 2015, Platt received the Behler Turtle Conservation Award from the IUCN / SSC Tortoise and Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group.

Web links

• Profile at the National Geographic Society (with short biography)
• Kalyar Platt Receives the 10th Annual 2015 Behler Turtle Conservation Award (with short biography)
• Bibliography at Researchgate