Meet our grantees
Wild Animal Initiative funds academic research on high-priority questions in wild animal welfare.
The goal of our grants program is to fund research that deepens scientific knowledge of the welfare of wild animals in order to better understand how to improve the welfare of as many wild animals as possible, regardless of what causes the threats to their well-being.
We showcase our grantees and their projects here and continuously update this page as new projects are added.
Towards welfare-centered prescribed fire
Grantee: Dale Nimmo
Institution: Charles Sturt University, Australia
Project summary
This project will investigate how prescribed burning affects wild animal welfare, and whether welfare state helps determine survival and harm suffered. The team will study bush rats (Rattus fuscipes) in forest blocks scheduled for prescribed burns and in control sites, combining behavioral, body-condition, injury, and non-invasive physiological measures to infer welfare changes. Lightweight telemetry will enable tracking of survival and severe harm, while fire-severity mapping, refuge measurements, and camera traps will help identify the mechanisms involved. The goal is to generate evidence to help burns be planned and implemented in ways that reduce avoidable suffering.
Environmental drivers of welfare in urban rats: A multimodal field study of micro-habitat conditions and affective behavior
Grantee: Emily Mackevicius
Institution: Basis Research Institute, United States
Project summary
This project will investigate how urban micro-habitat conditions shape the affective and social lives of brown rats (Rattus norvegicus). Better tools for understanding rat behavior could support both wild animal welfare science and integrative management practices. The project will first test whether indicators developed in laboratory rodents such as ultrasonic vocalizations, posture, movement, social behavior, and surface temperature can be used to infer affective state and social experience in urban field settings. The team will then model how environmental features predict these indicators, with the goal of identifying urban conditions associated with positive or negative experiences.
Validating acoustic monitoring as a non-invasive welfare indicator in urban coyotes: Linking vocalizations to health status, social dynamics, and environmental quality
Grantee: Caroline Rowley
Institution: Duke University, United States
Project summary
Urban coyotes face welfare challenges including disease, parasites, habitat degradation, reliance on anthropogenic food sources, and stress from human-wildlife conflict. This project is a pilot study aimed at validating passive acoustic monitoring as a welfare assessment tool. Data will be collected via GPS collars fitted with microphones, autonomous recording units, thermal camera traps and biological sampling. Using models and machine learning, the researchers will test whether vocal features correlate with established welfare indicators and whether individual coyotes can be identified from their howls alone. The aim is to develop a scalable, non-invasive framework for monitoring the welfare of free-ranging animals.
Comparative assessment of capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) welfare in protected, semi-anthropized, and anthropized environments in Argentina
Grantee: Débora Silvia Racciatti
Institution: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Project summary
This project will assess how different levels of human disturbance are associated with behavioral, physiological, and health-related welfare indicators in capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris). Using camera traps, direct observations, non-invasive fecal sampling, and body condition assessments, the team will evaluate a suite of indicators and test not only whether they vary in predicted directions across environments, but how consistently they converge across welfare domains, identifying which measures most reliably discriminate conditions of higher versus lower welfare in free-ranging populations.
Does DNA methylation reflect environmental and social adversity?
Grantee: Daniel T. Blumstein
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Project summary
This project will investigate the welfare effects of early cumulative adversity in free-living yellow-bellied marmots. It will look for associations between the adversity index and behaviors that indicate general wariness (flight initiation distance, time allocated to vigilance while foraging, the propensity to emit alarm calls while foraging); biomarkers that indicate physiological stress (fecal glucocorticoid levels, neutrophil:lymphocyte ratios); and two measures of aging (telomere length and DNA methylation). By quantifying these behavioral indices of wariness and the suite of biomarkers that culminate in telomeres and epigenetic state in pups throughout their first year and in older animals throughout their lives, the project will determine whether adverse environmental experiences have immediate and lasting effects on welfare.
Remote welfare assessment in wildlife using stand-off Raman spectroscopy
Grantees: Jose Gonzalez-Rodriguez and Teresa Romero
Institution: University of Lincoln
Project summary
This project aims to develop a stand-off Raman spectroscopy system as a non-invasive tool to assess hormonal levels in wild animals, which can be integrated into welfare assessments. The project also aims to validate under standardized and natural conditions how biomarkers of long-term stress relate to a range of stressors that may affect wild animal welfare. They will use a combination of socio-positive (e.g., play, grooming) and negative (e.g., aggression, screaming) behaviors, indices of social integration, behavioral indicators of anxiety (i.e., self-directed behaviors), and resting behavior, as well as physical indicators of welfare (body condition, instances of injury).
Validating body posture as a novel marker of well-being in animals
Grantee: Nicola Koyama
Institution: Liverpool John Moores University
Project summary
A few studies on nonhuman primates have found that a hunched posture is a response to social separation and physical inflammation, but research linking whole body posture and physiological measures of welfare is lacking. This project will combine established measures of affective valence (nasal temperature) and arousal (iris-pupil ratio) to validate body posture as a new measure of affective valence. Two months of video data will be collected and used for thermal imaging, behavioral, and postural analysis from groups of wild Barbary macaques, along with pilot data for comparison from non-human primate zoo animals. Ultimately, the project aims to share a new validated measure and conceptual framework that can be applied to a range of wild mammals.
An evaluation of effective disturbance mitigation measures for European badgers (Meles meles) occupying setts during forestry operations
Grantee: Stephen McAuliffe
Institution: University of Brighton and Forest Research
Project summary
In order to avoid possible disturbance to European badgers, forestry guidance in England states that activities using heavy machinery should be prohibited within 20 meters of active badger setts. This research aims to validate that the approved noise and vibration mitigation buffer distances intended to prevent disturbance from anthropogenic activities are effective. Observations of badger behavior will be made in woodland habitats, and fecal cortisol metabolites will be collected for analysis. If changes in behavior and increases in cortisol levels are not found following exposure to forestry noise and vibration greater than 20 meters away, robust evidence will be provided to validate that badger welfare is not being adversely impacted by legally sanctioned forestry activities.
Parasites in the city: How is the impact of parasites on wild animal welfare affected by urbanization?
Grantee: Amanda Trask
Institutions: Institute of Zoology (IOZ), Zoological Society of London (ZSL)
Project summary
This project will evaluate the extent to which parasitism and urbanization impact wild animal welfare, both independently and synergistically, using physiological data on the internal and external parasite loads of deceased gray squirrels, as well as their body condition, immune function, and stress response. The researchers will also collect behavioral welfare indicators from other squirrels using camera traps. This data will be collected along a gradient of urbanization levels and analyzed in the context of the squirrels’ sex and age, to compare population-level welfare across sites varying in degree of urbanization and average parasite metrics and predict how future increases in urbanization might impact wildlife welfare.
Are we making urban wildlife sick?
Grantee: Carl Soulsbury
Institution: University of Lincoln
Project summary
The goal of this project is to test whether differences in welfare among individual red foxes and individual European hedgehogs are explained by specific environmental stressors arising from urbanization (e.g., increased human population density, noise pollution, or reduced habitat heterogeneity). Notably, on a population level, foxes appear to have fared well alongside humans, while hedgehogs have struggled to cope with urbanization. The study will confirm whether this contrast is also seen at the level of individual welfare, and offers a unique opportunity to identify common environmental stressors that may be impacting the health and welfare of urban wildlife more generally. To assess welfare, the project will perform cognitive judgment bias and novel object tests and combine them with non-invasive indicators of physiological stress (fecal glucocorticoids and eye/ear temperature) and health (pathogen load).