Current programs
We work in three modes: scoping candidate areas against our standards for impact, running coordinated research programs on the ones that pass, and building the pipeline of people who can run them.
How we work
We scope
Scoping is where most of our work happens. We take a candidate area — a bottleneck, a stalled field, an intervention nobody has carried past the lab — and test it against our standards for impact: how many animals it touches, whether a coordinated push would actually move it, who would use the result, and what it would cost to find out. Most candidates do not survive this stage, and that is the point.
We run coordinated research programs
Areas that pass scoping become coordinated research programs: time-bound, milestone-driven, and run by a program manager with a budget and the authority to reallocate it. We borrow the tools of the innovation landscape — ARPA-style program design, milestone payments, focused research organizations — and apply them to problems that academic funding and commercial investment both leave stranded.
We develop program managers
The binding constraint on this model is people who can run a program well. We are setting up a route for scientists to learn program design and management in practice. More here soon — we are finishing negotiations with a partner team on how this will be run.
Approved programs
Through scoping and into design. Ready to launch pending additional funding.
A coordinated research program to make rodent fertility control work at landscape scale — pairing contraceptive cargo with delivery that can actually reach five of the world’s most damaging rodent species.
Programs in scoping
Being tested against our standards for impact.
Rodent fertility control
Addressing the limitations of existing rodent control products by developing a solution that is safe for people as well as the environment, humane for rodents and other wildlife, and actually works against the forces of compensatory mortality and immigration. Now in design as the Rodenticide Replacement Program →
Welfare indicator development
Extending the feasibility of animal welfare assessment in the wild by developing three to five indicators that work across a large taxonomic category (e.g., all mammals), can be deployed in the field at reasonable cost, and integrate welfare over a meaningful portion of an animal's lifespan (e.g., at least 10%).
The ecology of bird-window collisions
Understanding the ecological and welfare costs of bird-window collisions, an understudied phenomenon affecting somewhere between hundreds of millions and billions of birds per year in the US alone.
Wildlife vaccination
Identifying and developing treatment for a disease that affects vast numbers of wild animals, but is ecologically safe to eliminate.
We’re also exploring several other areas as candidates for scoping, including vulture conservation, improving near-term ecological forecasting, better estimating invertebrate populations, and reducing reliance on managed pollinators.
If you’re a scientist with an interest in one of these areas, tell us about your work.