Challenge Grants

There is no active call for proposals at this time. View our roadmap to find out when the next CFP will open.

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. Each round of Challenge Grants calls for projects within one or more specific themes. These flagship projects should be led by experienced principal investigators and demonstrate a high degree of relevance to high priority research areas, novelty, and methodological rigor.

Below you can find information on eligibility, proposal guidelines, selection criteria, the application process, and what to expect as a grantee.

Grant size

$50,000 — $100,000 USD total

Duration

Up to 5 years

Eligibility

What is eligible

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.
We prioritize funding for direct research costs (e.g. supplies, materials), though we do fund other expense areas (e.g. stipends, salaries, capital equipment) if they are fully justified relative to the project goals. Further details on what is eligible for funding can be found in our FAQs. We 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.

What is not eligible

We do not provide funding for indirect costs or institutional overhead.
We are unable to sponsor visas, so we generally cannot fund work that would be carried out in the United States by a non-US resident.
We 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.
We generally do not fund more than one active project being led by the same Principal Investigator at the same time.
Projects focused exclusively on a single welfare domain.
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

We evaluate proposed projects in terms of their scope, feasibility, novelty, and specific relevance to wild animal welfare.

Click the "+" in each section below for details on our general selection criteria:

- We aim to understand and improve the welfare of as many individual animals as possible. Therefore, we prefer projects that focus on more abundant species, all else being equal.
- Transferability is also a crucial consideration, but requires nuanced consideration of both the focal taxa and the welfare issues being addressed by the study.
  - Research on an endangered species of rodent or fish could have implications for related species that are highly abundant.
  - Similarly, a study on a ubiquitous welfare issue, like hunger, is going to have further-reaching implications than an otherwise equivalent study on the impact of local logging operations.

Scope

- Our consideration is not limited to direct, short-term impacts.
- Wildlife management decisions influenced by the results of a project may affect a vast number of animals over time.
- Long-term impact is necessarily speculative, but we would like to see some plausible theory of change explaining how the results of a project could eventually translate into improvements in wild animal welfare.
- When considering the magnitude of welfare improvements, we consider both severity and duration. For example, a disease that is rare but has a high mortality rate may have a similar overall welfare impact to a disease that has sublethal welfare effects but is common.

Impact

- Research projects may promote engagement by validating a new method or introducing a new concept or study design that would make it easier for others to enter the field of wild animal welfare or open up new avenues of research.
- Policy implications with the potential to persuade wildlife managers/policy-makers to consider wild animal welfare may also qualify as engagement.

Engagement

- We recognize that it is challenging to get funding for almost all areas of research, especially in ecology. However, as an organization with a very specific mission to promote research into wild animal welfare, we try to reserve our limited financial resources for projects that would be unlikely to obtain funding from mainstream scientific or conservation funders (e.g. NSF, NERC) due to their unique relevance to wild animal welfare.
- This means that we are less likely to select otherwise sound and exciting projects that also address conservation concerns (e.g. population viability) or that conflate welfare with more widely studied concepts, such as evolutionary fitness.

Neglectedness

Feasibility

- We evaluate whether the proposed methods are sufficient to answer the research questions being posed. This includes not only the study design, but also the quality of indicators being used to infer animals’ welfare.
- We also consider applicants’ prior experience of applying similar methods.
- Finally, we consider whether underlying assumptions of the proposed study, such as independence of certain variables, or expected effect sizes, seem plausible or have already been tested (e.g. through a pilot or previous studies).

- Many of the causes of wild animal suffering are currently beyond human control, but we can avoid causing unnecessary harm through research methods. This is important not only in terms of ethics, but also for scientific data quality, as animals who have been acutely stressed by invasive sampling procedures may behave differently or exhibit altered physiology.
- Projects that propose using invasive methods must explain why those methods are required and non-invasive alternatives are insufficient.
- To avoid perpetuating human inequality within ecological research, we also expect applicants proposing to conduct research in countries which they are not normally resident in to include high-level collaborators with roots in those countries.

Research ethics

- 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.
- If some aspects of your project are of significantly greater interest to WAI than others, we may be able to offer partial funding for those aspects. You may identify in your proposal which activities are more or less essential.

Cost-effectiveness

Relevance to research priorities

- 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 and 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.

Proposal 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.

If you are unsure whether your project fits within our scope, please review our FAQs.

Application process

Applicant submits short Expression of Interest (EOI) form (preview).
EOI is reviewed for eligibility and relevance by the Wild Animal Initiative Grants team.
If the EOI is shortlisted, the applicant is invited to develop a full proposal. If you have expressed interest in a fellowship in addition to your main project, you will also be informed at this stage of whether we will continue to evaluate you as a potential fellow.
The full proposal is externally reviewed by project-relevant experts.
The proposal is externally reviewed by specialists in animal care and ethics.
The proposal is reviewed by Wild Animal Initiative technical experts.
The lead applicant may be asked to provide clarification or make modifications in response to reviewer feedback.
The review team discusses shortlisted proposals and makes final selection of the most promising projects.
Final decisions are shared with applicants and announced on our website. Decisions are generally made within 6 months of the EOI deadline.

What to expect as a grantee

Grantee signs a communications agreement.

If necessary, grantee obtains permission from Wild Animal Initiative for any major discretional changes to the project (e.g. replacing key activities or increasing the number of animals sampled).
Grantee provides Wild Animal Initiative with annual reports on the progress of the project, including publications, presentations, and any unforeseen changes.
Grantee provides Wild Animal Initiative with a final report within three months of the project’s completion date.