Fall 2023 Methods Workshop
In Fall 2023, Wild Animal Initiative hosted a five-part virtual workshop series on methods in wild animal welfare science. The program was free and covered an introduction to wild animal welfare, guidance on measuring wild animal welfare, guidance on creating and validating new measures, and a walkthrough exercise in which participants designed a wild animal welfare study. Selected talks from the workshops are shared here.
Workshop 4 | November 27, 2023How to Create and Validate New Measures
This session guided researchers in creating and validating novel ways to measure wild animal welfare. Professor Melissa Bateson described what constitutes a valid indicator and provided five methods to establish the validity of a given indicator in wild animals. Dr. Michaël Beaulieu put this process into practice. Lastly, four Wild Animal Initiative grantees whose projects include validating welfare measures presented their research.
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Professor Melissa Bateson is the Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Behaviour and Evolution. As an ethologist, her research focuses on understanding how stressful lifetime experiences impact the behavior, cognition, and well-being of various nonhuman animal species.
Michaël Beaulieu
Validating Animal Welfare Indicators
No recording or slides available.
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Dr. Michaël Beaulieu completed his veterinary studies at the University of Nantes and his PhD on the ecophysiology and behavioral ecology of penguins at the University of Strasbourg. In his post-docs, he mostly worked on songbirds and butterflies. He has taught animal ecology and conservation and organized ornithological excursions. Michaël has spent much time in polar regions (as a researcher and a naturalist guide) and is currently located in Germany.
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Dr. Patrick Tkaczynsk is a behavioral ecologist based at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom.
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Sam Sonnega is broadly interested in the intersection of ecology, evolution, and endocrinology. He has worked in a diverse array of taxa and ecosystems, ranging from sailfin mollies in the lab to snowshoe hares in the boreal forest. He is currently pursuing a PhD under the supervision of Michael Sheriff, examining the effects of predation risk on the physiology and behavior of wild mice. His latest fascination is how host-associated microbial communities contribute to host phenotypes, and how this can facilitate adaptive responses to environmental perturbations.
Claudia Wascher
Assessing Animal Welfare from Bioacoustic Monitoring in Red-Billed Choughs
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Dr. Claudia Wascher is an Associate Professor in Behavioural Biology at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests include social cognition, physiology, and vocal communication.
Paul Jerem
Exploring Thermal Imaging as a Non-Invasive Method to Investigate Physiological Welfare Parameters in Altricial Nestlings
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Dr. Paul Jerem is an early-career researcher at the University of Groningen interested in how wild animals cope with changing environments — both in an immediate sense, and over evolutionary timescales. He is currently exploring the possibility of using thermal imaging of body surface temperatures as a non-invasive method for inferring physiological state (e.g. stress or energetics) in wild animals.
Additional information
Event Accessibility and Inclusivity Guide
Contact
Grey Fernandez, event coordinator
grey.fernandez@wildanimalinitiative.org