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.
Evaluating wild animal welfare in landscapes of fear at urban-wildland interfaces
Grantee: Dave Daversa
Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Project summary
This project will investigate the lifetime welfare impacts of landscapes of fear, examining how they vary with respect to an animal’s life history strategy and exploring potential indirect, interactive system-level effects. The study will combine multiple lines of evidence of welfare (behavioral, hormonal, and epigenetic). In particular, it will use DNA methylation to understand the aging and health of individual animals, validating its potential to record cumulative stress over an animal’s lifetime. It will assess the components of the landscape leading to a fear response and resultant difference in welfare, and contribute to our understanding of how variation in life history strategies differentially interact with long-term welfare.