Deadline: 01-Nov-2024

The Wild Animal Initiative’s Challenge Grants support researchers exploring critical research questions that will unlock new avenues of wild animal welfare research and are not prioritized by other funders.

Research Topics 

• Welfare indicator validation: Testing whether proposed welfare indicators and metrics respond in the biologically expected direction under conditions that are established to be positive or negative for welfare.
• Interspecific interactions: Trade-offs and synergies in the welfare of members of different wild animal species, including via predation, competition, or facilitation.
• Population dynamics: Welfare implications of population size relative to limiting factors at all scales, from resource limitation, to sibling competition, to cooperative defense, to disease transmission.
• Cause-specific mortality: How wild animals die, and what factors may directly and indirectly lead to their deaths.
• Landscape ecology: Variation in wild animal welfare across land cover types and in relation to geographical features, such as habitat edges.
• Cascade effects: Conceptual analysis of community dynamics to understand indirect effects of species and habitat parameters on others’ welfare.
• Welfare interventions: Intervening in ecological systems to improve wild animal welfare, including characterizing direct impacts and potential indirect impacts on non-target species. Promising examples include wildlife contraception and vaccination.
• Juvenile welfare: Investigating how welfare varies across life stages in wild animals, with a particular focus on early life stages, as these tend to be the most abundant.
• Invertebrate welfare: Assessing welfare in wild invertebrates.
• Fish welfare: Assessing welfare in wild fish.

Funding Information

• Grant amount: up to $50,000 — $100,000 USD
• Duration: Up to 5 years

Eligibility Criteria

• Challenge Grant projects must be led by an experienced principal investigator, but can include financial support for students or other early-career collaborators. When submitting an expression of interest for a Challenge Grant, applicants may request to be considered for a WAI Fellowship, which offers mentorship and a supplementary stipend to postdoctoral researchers and PhD students pursuing a long-term career in wild animal welfare research. The process and parameters for 2024 fellowships will be shared with those invited to apply at the full proposal stage.
• Eligible projects include those that are standalone, or those that add a wild animal welfare component to an existing non-Wild Animal Initiative funded project to broaden its scope.
• Projects must be led by a principal investigator who is affiliated with a university or other research institution (e.g. a government agency).
• Projects must be led by or include collaborators who are residents of all countries where field work will take place. If a project is managed by an NGO, that NGO must be registered in the country where field work will take place.
• They prioritize funding for direct research costs (e.g. supplies, materials), though they do fund other expense areas (e.g. stipends, salaries, capital equipment) if they are fully justified relative to the project goals. They will not reject a proposal based solely on budget without first asking applicants to consider modifications, but applicants should limit their requests to what is reasonably needed to complete the project.

Ineligibility Criteria

• They do not provide funding for indirect costs or institutional overhead.
• They are unable to sponsor visas, so they generally cannot fund work that would be carried out in the United States by a non-US resident.
• They are unable to fund research carried out in nations subject to sanctions by the United States (e.g. Iran, North Korea, Russia) or researchers who are residents of those nations.
• They generally do not fund more than one active project being led by the same Principal Investigator at the same time.
• Projects that do not characterize the subjective experience (welfare) of animals or do not treat it as their objective.
• Projects focused exclusively on wildlife conservation.

Selection Criteria

• Scope: The approximate number of animals who could potentially benefit from the results of a project. They aim to understand and improve the welfare of as many individual animals as possible.
• Impact: The likelihood that a project will lead to an improvement in wild animal welfare now or in the future, and the magnitude of that potential improvement.
• Engagement: The extent to which a project is likely to accelerate or inspire other research or action in support of wild animal welfare.
• Neglectedness: The distinctiveness of a project’s relevance to wild animal welfare, such that it would be unlikely to attract funding from another organization.
• Feasibility: The likelihood that a project could be carried out as described and accomplish its objectives.
• Research ethics: The risk of a project causing harm to human or non-human animals through its methods. Projects that propose using invasive methods must explain why those methods are required and non-invasive alternatives are insufficient.
• Cost-effectiveness: Given two projects of approximately equal overall merit (considering the above criteria), they will give preference to the one with the lower budget. Limiting activities in your project that do not contribute to understanding welfare or obtaining co-funding for them can improve your likelihood of receiving funding from WAI.

Guidelines

• Proposals must clearly explain how the project is relevant to wild animals’ welfare, as defined by Wild Animal Initiative.
• Proposals must clearly identify and explain the project’s relevance to one or more of the themes featured in the call.
• Proposals should clearly explain the project’s relevance to multiple domains of welfare.
• Projects must adhere to Wild Animal Initiative’s guidance for animals involved in research, if your project will involve any work with animals, in the field or the lab. Please be aware we are less likely to select a proposed project that would cause any harm to animals. If distressing methods are to be used, welfare concerns should be elaborated in the animal methods form and the methods should be justified with evidence showing why the use of alternatives would not be possible. We generally will not fund projects that use destructive sampling methods. If you believe that the objectives of your study cannot be accomplished without killing or physically harming animals and you cannot identify alternative methods, please reach out and we can discuss what options may be available to you.
• Proposals must clearly justify the study approach chosen, including identifying the resources available for the study and the expertise of team members.
• Proposals must clearly describe the amount of time required from each project team member and confirm that they are able to make that commitment.

For more information, visit Wild Animal Initiative.