A Project of the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program
Thanks to a generous grant from the New York Community Trust, the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is thrilled to announce a first-of-its-kind project at the science-policy nexus: the Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab.
The WILD Lab is an applied research and outreach initiative dedicated to advancing the welfare of wild animals in urban environments by aiming to understand how urban infrastructure affects wild animals, and how governments and communities can respond.
Our work will involve interdisciplinary research and cross-sectoral collaboration with four main areas of focus:
- Scientific research: Investigating the impacts of urban infrastructure and land use practices on wild animal welfare in cities
- GIS mapping: Producing spatial maps documenting urban wildlife and the ecological factors that may influence their wellbeing
- Policy analysis: Conducting policy analysis and developing guidance for integrating wild animal welfare into local policies
- Education & outreach: Convening stakeholder dialogues and programs to build a broad coalition for positive change
The lab’s principal investigator will be WAWP co-director Jeff Sebo. Mal Graham will serve as science coordinator, Adalene Minelli as policy coordinator, and Audrey Becker as lab administrator. This core team will be joined by many additional collaborators both internal and external to NYU.
Key institutional partners will include the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection (NYU Arts & Science), the Guarini Center on Environmental, Energy and Land Use Law (NYU Law), the Office of Sustainability (NYU), and Wild Animal Initiative, among many others.
You can visit our website to learn more about the project.
Our team can be reached by email at wildanimalwelfare@nyu.edu.
Happy to see development and funding in this field.
I would flag the obvious issue that a very small proportion of wild animals live in cities, given that cities take up a small proportion of the world. But I do know that there have been investigation into rats, which do exist in great numbers in cities.
The website for this project shows a fox - but I presume that this was chosen because it's a sympathetic animal - not because foxes in cities represent a great deal of suffering.
I understand that tradeoffs need to be made to work with different funding sources and circumstances. But I'm of course curious what the broader story is here.
I was just looking into Wild Animal Initiative's 2024 report, and it includes a cost-effectiveness analysis of "A government program to vaccinate raccoons against rabies" (pp. 28 to 31). They estimated the program prevented 0.0641 deaths/$ (= 1/15.6). Wild raccoons live for about 5 years. If each deaths from rabies prevented resulted in 2.5 additional raccoon-years (= 5/2), the progra... (read more)