Progress update on our grantees’ research projects
WAI grantees at a March 2025 meetup in London
September 9, 2025
Since 2022, our Grants Program has funded research on wild animal welfare — from validating ways to measure the welfare of free-living wild animals, to discovering the factors that influence it, to assessing the effectiveness of interventions to improve it. These research projects form a major part of the growing field of wild animal welfare science and our mission to accelerate advances in it.
Three years on, many of these projects are now completed or have made significant progress.
In tandem with — and often resulting from — this progress, our grantees have described an academic environment that is more receptive to valuing and studying the welfare of free-living wild animals. There are now keynote speeches, workshops, and symposia devoted to wild animal welfare at scientific conferences, which are increasingly highlighting the topic. There are a growing number of collaborations among researchers who work on wild animal welfare, and that base is expanding.
We have awarded a total of 84 grants since 2022. Of these, we have so far received progress reports from 57 of those research teams (68%). The data below is based on these 57 reports — so while it is representative, it is not comprehensive.
Because projects vary in size and complexity, as well as in the year that the grant was awarded, 7 projects have not yet begun, 52 are ongoing, and 25 have now been completed. The data presented below includes projects at all three of these stages.
The average Seed Grant project takes 1–2 years to complete, and the average Challenge Grant project 3–5 years. Discovery Grants are a new category of grant that we awarded for the first time this year, and we expect that projects funded by this type of grant will take 2–3 years to complete. These average project lengths are based on the typical amount of time that it takes to complete small, large, and mid-size scientific research projects at academic research institutions.
We award grants with the expectation that projects will result in knowledge advances in the field, peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals, and, ideally, other contributions to the wild animal welfare science community. Because 63% of projects are either not yet begun or still in progress, further knowledge advancements will result after they are completed. It typically takes 1–2 years after the completion of a project for its results to be published in a scientific journal, so we expect to be able to share many more publications from our grantees in the coming years.
Knowledge produced by the grantees’ projects
Grantees’ contributions to academic community-building
And 100% of reporting grantees said their project provided opportunities for them to discuss wild animal welfare with colleagues.
Highlighted successes
The team at Bristol Zoological Society developed a pioneering methodology for welfare monitoring in aquatic invertebrates — incorporating identification tagging devices, behavioral observations, and body condition scores — to assess the welfare of white-clawed crayfish. This methodology is thought to be the first of its kind that can be used to assess the welfare of free-living aquatic crustaceans in this way, and potentially other taxa. Thanks to the new methodology, Bristol Zoological Society discovered that a conservation translocation program for white-clawed crayfish showed that captive-born and wild-born animals exhibited similar growth rates, but also showed differences in behavior, which may have negative welfare impacts.
Maristela Martins de Camargo developed an innovative, non-invasive saliva collector that has been successful in attracting and collecting samples from multiple wild species. Additionally, the video footage Maristela and her team have collected now serves as a species survey for a forest area, and is actively being used by Universidade de São Paulo campus personnel for management practices.
PhD student Jordan McDowall on Alex Thornton’s research team has completed the first automated cognitive bias task conducted under field conditions, representing a significant methodological advancement in measuring wild animal welfare. Alex’s research on wild bird welfare led to his invitation to join the European Research Council-funded initiative AFFECT-EVO COST Action, which is focused on animal affect and welfare. It also led to a consultation group on wild red-billed chough populations in Scotland, where Alex has highlighted WAI's work. Alex’s role on the University of Exeter’s Ethics Committee and the Animal Welfare and Ethics Review Board has been strengthened by his growing understanding of wild animal welfare, allowing him to shape guidelines for research on wild animals.
As part of Ruth Feber and Paul Johnson’s project, which used butterfly larvae as a model for auditing the welfare impact of agricultural activities on invertebrates, they developed a risk analysis framework to assess the welfare impacts of agricultural practices like silage cutting and herbicide application on butterfly larvae. The scale of the welfare impacts assessed by the framework is potentially huge due to the area of land and numbers of individuals affected.
Saana Isojunno and Eve Jourdain’s collaborative project on orca welfare used a novel latent-state model to identify individuals with unmet foraging needs (long-term hunger) in both free-ranging whales in Scotland and naturally entrapped whales in Norwegian fjords. The model successfully estimated the entrapped whales to be "non-foraging" at high probability and showed cases of declining as well as recovery of individual body condition, highlighting the value of follow-up measurements and collaborative monitoring. Saana and Eve plan to publish their custom-developed R software open-access for photogrammetric analysis.