Dr Rachel Paltridge is an arid zone ecologist currently working for the Indigenous Desert Alliance from her home town of Alice Springs. She has been working with Indigenous Rangers across the desert for 30 years on projects involving feral cat control, fire management and threatened species.

Rachel is passionate about 2-way Science – integrating Traditional Indigenous knowledge and skills with the latest technologies and scientific methods to come up with innovative methods to manage and monitor biodiversity.

Rachel has witnessed first hand the devastating impacts of feral cats on great desert skink and bilby populations and understands the need for target-specific cat control methods particularly in areas where dingoes are either an important predator of feral cats and/or significant totemic animals for Traditional Custodians. She supports programs that make predator management tools more accessible to Indigenous rangers through improved awareness, funding, training, and logistics systems.