Behind the scenes of antelope conservation with Sophie Whitemore

By Jasmine Santilhano, Marwell Wildlife Conservation Placement Student

On a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, Sophie Whitemore looks out of her office window. The sky is a hazy blue, the grass is sun-bleached, and the trees stand almost still in the heavy summer heat.

But there is something else, something that marks this as no ordinary office view: in the distance, a small herd of scimitar-horned oryx are grazing.

They are a symbolic reminder of Marwell’s history – and Sophie’s work.

Sophie has been part of Marwell Wildlife’s conservation team since 2022. Before then, she worked as a conveyancing paralegal, but she switched into conservation after completing Marwell’s Master of Research in Wildlife Conservation in partnership with the University of Southampton.

Now, her role includes being the Programme Officer for the IUCN’s Antelope Specialist Group (ASG), which promotes the long-term conservation of all antelope species.

“We have such a long history with antelope at Marwell,” she explains. “We are known in the zoo world as an ungulate specialist.”

The oryx outside Sophie’s window are not only a link to Marwell’s conservation work, but our history, too.

Office-based conservation: Sophie’s work

The main part of Sophie’s work for the ASG is completing assessments for the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and IUCN Green Status of Species for all 150 antelope species and subspecies of antelope.

“The Red List of Threatened Species and the Green Status of Species is a global inventory of the extinction risk, global conservation status, and conservation recovery for tens of thousands of species. This is vital information that informs global conservation action.”

“The Red List looks at risk of extinction, whereas the Green Status is a measure of species recovery across their former indigenous range.” The Green Status also measures the impact of conservation on a species’ survival.

Sophie also manages the ASG’s communications, such as their social media platforms, and undertakes her own research on Extinct in the Wild species.

Most species that are Extinct in the Wild – those that are found only in ex situ care, like zoos, botanic gardens and aquariums – need additional support to prevent them from going extinct entirely. Sophie’s research looks at quantifying that need.

“My research came off the back of my Masters project. I’ve created criteria that are relevant to populations under human care, because the Red List assessments are based on wild populations only.”

Additionally, Sophie is the International Studbook Keeper for the Endangered scimitar-horned oryx. The ones she can see from her window are just five of 3000 registered in zoos, safari parks, and conservation centres around the world – and Sophie can see the pedigree data for all of them on her computer screen.

The species’ varying regional population management coordinators use these data when moving animals between institutions or pairing them up to breed, ensuring the continuing viability of the gene pool.

“They make all the decisions. I just have the studbook.”

What next?

“Completing the Red List reassessments is the next big thing, because they’re now almost ten years out of date.”

It is a huge piece of work, with potential conservation implications for antelope species the world over.

The studbook, on the other hand, is all about maintenance, and the scimitar-horned oryx studbook is one of the largest ones.

“There’s a lot of in history and responsibility. Even though the day-to-day feels like it is just data entry, it is actually part of something much bigger.”

Elsewhere Sophie has done a lot of work for the species – from campaigning with BIAZA for the first ever Scimitar-horned Oryx Day in August 2025, to producing a special issue of the ASG newsletter focussed purely on scimitar-horned oryx and their recovery.

And every once in a while, Sophie has the chance to leave her office. In May 2025, she went out to Tunisia, where Marwell has worked for 40 years to reintroduce and monitor wild scimitar-horned oryx.

For a while, then, her view was not five Oryx, but forty.