Two William & Mary students hack through roadside brush in Virginia to place a camera that tracks animal movement across a busy highway. Half a world away, W&M and Nepali students gather stories from Himalayan herders about conflict and coexistence with the large predators. Meanwhile, back at W&M, a student refines a machine algorithm to automatically count thousands of migrating birds in Nebraska. Though separated by geography and culture, these scenes are threads in a shared narrative—one that links ecological and human well-being and weaves local action into a global conservation effort.

Biodiversity matters to people everywhere and plays a vital role in maintaining the health of the planet, but globally we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Effectively addressing biodiversity loss demands tailored, locally grounded actions that consider a region’s specific ecological, cultural, and social characteristics and needs. Yet, the core challenges facing biodiversity are strikingly similar worldwide. This commonality makes the need for exchange of conservation knowledge, tools, and methodologies more crucial than ever before.

W&M students are driving the exchange of conservation knowledge from local communities to global networks through collaborative, hands-on, interdisciplinary research and storytelling. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and commitment, they represent a new generation of conservation leaders dedicated to protecting both planet and people.

“There’s oftentimes this idea that great research done at universities doesn’t have an impact outside of the university walls. Our goal at the Institute for Integrative Conservation is to make sure that the work being done by our students and faculty has a broader conservation impact.” – Robert Rose, Institute for Integrative Conservation

Local Meets Global: W&M Students Connect the Dots for Conservation

Globally focused conservation education and partnerships are key in facilitating transfer of knowledge between scales. The W&M Institute for Integrative Conservation (IIC) puts students at the helm of this knowledge exchange through its Conservation Research Program (CRP), an undergraduate research program that positions students, mentored by W&M faculty, to design integrative conservation research in collaboration with conservation partners, and apply it to real conservation challenges at local and global scales. Students work closely with partners over a full year on projects in diverse locations around the world.

CRP students are sharing knowledge across landscapes, scales, and cultures to address globally shared challenges. They demonstrate how global frameworks can be adapted for local conservation, how localized conservation initiatives can scale up for global application, and how conservation successes can be shared laterally, from one community to another, even in another part of the world.

“I think about scale a lot, how to change things from local to global and from global to local and to compare things. The communities in one location might not be similar in another location, but the pattern is similar. We all are dependent on the nature for something one way or the other. We are all connected.”– Sapana Lohani, Institute for Integrative Conservation

Tracking Biodiversity: Conservation Technology with Global Potential

Keeping track of animal populations over time and across different places is essential for protecting wildlife and the places they live. Knowing how many animals are out there, whether in one area or across the globe, helps us understand how species are doing and guides conservation action. Counting animals is central to conservation efforts all over the world, but it is a slow process often done manually. Animals typically don’t stay put, so counts can be inaccurate — especially when it comes to animals that fly.

Every spring sandhill cranes migrate north, and most of them make a pit stop in Nebraska. This is the one time and place on their flyway where they are most abundant and stationary, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has been counting them there for decades. This crane congregation along the Central Platte River Valley is one of North America’s most remarkable wildlife events, with hundreds of thousands of birds gathered in a single location—a spectacle that supports a thriving Nebraska tourism economy.

“One of the biggest challenges in conservation is counting animals. It’s time consuming, it’s costly. It can be dangerous. We have to get beyond flying in a plane and counting how many elephants or zebra or sandhill cranes we see.” – Robert Rose, Institute for Integrative Conservation 

As part of a CRP student research project in 2022, W&M student Emilio Luz-Ricca ’23 partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to improve how sandhill cranes were counted. With guidance from W&M faculty mentors Robert Rose and Gregory Hunt, and USFWS biologist Brad Pickens, Luz-Ricca developed an innovative counting model using advanced deep learning technology, which can predict or make decisions by analyzing data. He trained an algorithm to identify cranes from thermal (heat detecting) imagery collected by USFWS plane flyovers. Because sandhill cranes have a distinct heat signature, Luz-Ricca was able to train the algorithm to recognize a crane and then rapidly count all the cranes in an image.

Expanding on the work of Luz-Ricca (2023) published in 2023, W&M data science student Andrew Lee ’25 enhanced the models, developing a scalable framework to help ecologists tackle broader animal counting challenges, such as identifying non-target species and managing large datasets. 

Luz-Ricca and Lee’s work has helped USFWS detect and track sandhill cranes with unprecedented accuracy, enhancing the ability to monitor the crane populations at their most significant migration stopover. This innovative model has revolutionized sandhill crane counting and holds strong potential for adaptation to surveys of other congregating bird or animal populations with distinctive thermal signatures.

“We focused on a specific survey area in Nebraska, but we realized that this can be applied to many more settings, that can even go globally.” – W&M alum Andrew Lee ‘25

In a world where rapid conservation solutions are essential, technology is playing an increasingly vital role. Tools like satellite imagery, drones, and GPS are being leveraged in transformative ways to study and safeguard the planet’s most vulnerable species and ecosystems. Cameras, in particular, are helping researchers track and predict wildlife movement patterns, a capability that becomes especially crucial where worlds literally collide: on our roadways.

Local and Global Knowledge Sharing to Keep People and Wildlife Safe

As cities and towns expand worldwide, more roads cut through the wild spaces where animals live and range, and more vehicles are driving on those roads. Getting across the road is a daily struggle for wild animals and often ends in vehicle collisions. An estimated seven to eight million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur globally each year. The U.S., with up to 2 million collisions annually, tops the list of countries with the most incidents. These incidents come with significant economic costs and threaten both animal and human lives. 

As urbanization expands, wildlife crossings offer a crucial tool for preserving ecosystems and ensuring the safe movement of animals in an increasingly fragmented world. Globally, government agencies and conservation groups are working together on wildlife crossing solutions that blend engineering and design in ways that work with nature instead of against it. Developing solutions involves studying the movement patterns of both wildlife and people to pinpoint where their paths cross and create dangerous collision hotspots.

Many of these hotspots are in Virginia’s Loudoun County, where rapid development near a robust ecological area has created an urgent need for road safety interventions. W&M students are working with Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources (DWR) to develop a framework for reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions locally that can be used to inform collision mitigation across the Commonwealth and globally. In 2023, W&M student Alexa Busby ’24, mentored by W&M faculty Robert Rose and Matthias Leu, worked with DWR District Biologist Jordan Green to map priority hotspots across the County using collision data and mitigation success metrics.

“This project is super important for conservation of wildlife and conservation of ecological habitat. If we don’t start protecting the ecologically robust areas that we have left, they’re gonna be gone before we know it and we’re currently impacting everyday wildlife movement, wildlife reproduction.” – Jordan Green, Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources

Building on this work, in 2024 students Sofia Politte ’26 and Cayley Santella ’25, with guidance from faculty mentor John Swaddle, worked with Green to set camera traps in the county to capture wildlife movement, aiming to identify factors that reduce collisions. Politte and Santella also identified the actors involved in the mitigation effort and clarified their respective priorities.

“When you hear ‘a local project’, it doesn’t sound very consequential, but it’s huge. It’s valid for the project not to have large scale impact, but we’re doing something that’s novel that can inspire others to build off.” – W&M student Sofia Politte ‘26

Because wildlife often travel across borders, it is important that towns, states, cities and countries work together. While animals, landscapes, and challenges vary by region, sharing knowledge about animal behavior and crossing design is crucial for planners so they can avoid mistakes, reduce costs, and implement effective solutions more quickly. This year W&M student Percy Zimering ’26 will advance exploration of frameworks for collaborative decision-making related to mitigation and W&M student Taylor Uem’26 will develop an app using acoustic monitors to further inform areas for mitigation.

The work in Loudoun County leverages wildlife corridor lessons and practices from around the world and directly informs the Virginia Wildlife Corridor Action Plan. This work contributes to a growing body of knowledge and methodologies for wildlife crossings and collision mitigation throughout Virginia and beyond.

“If you think about this from a global perspective, about areas of the world that aren’t as developed or have not been impacted by transportation systems as much as Virginia, the kinds of lessons we’re learning here absolutely can translate to areas that are beginning to have major road projects – and this is the time to think about it.” – Jordan Green, Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources

The collaborative approach to wildlife-vehicle collision mitigation demonstrates how global efforts can provide broad frameworks that can be adapted to specific local needs and contexts. When local initiatives are supported and linked to wider networks, they address immediate conservation needs while also strengthening global biodiversity strategies. This happens through direct protection of wildlife, testing and validating new methods and technologies, and sharing data with the global conservation community.

Sharing Solutions Across Borders 

Exchange of knowledge between communities and actors is critical for successful conservation because communities can share data and best practices directly with other communities around the world that are facing similar conservation issues. This global exchange has proved invaluable for herders and ranchers worldwide, who are learning from each other how to handle conflict with wild animals that prey on their livestock.

The Annapurna Conservation Area (ACA), high in the Himalayan region of Nepal, is the country’s largest and biodiversity-rich protected space. Here, herders who rely on agriculture and animal husbandry for survival are negotiating a different kind of human-wildlife conflict — with the ghost of the mountain, the snow leopard.

“The resilience of the community and the resilience of the ecosystem are so important, and we need to understand it. Conservation is always place based. It is going to be different based on where we are trying to work, in which ecosystem, with which community.” – Sapana Lohani, Institute for Integrative Conservation

Effective conservation of snow leopards must consider the needs and perspectives of local communities, and in 2024 W&M students Kate Marston ’25 and Liam McLinda ’25 and a team of Nepali students listened to what herders had to say about wildlife conflict within the Annapurna Conservation Area. Working alongside Rinzin Phunjok Lama of Nepal conservation organization, Ukali and with W&M faculty mentors Sapana Lohani and Fernando Galeana Rodriguez, the students gathered insights from herder communities on issues such as livestock-carnivore conflict, the influence of the ACA, and the wider effects of global environmental changes on local ecosystems and livelihoods. Their findings reveal the interconnections between carnivore conflict, global environmental shifts, and political dynamics within the ACA, underscoring the need to actively involve herders in conservation management and policymaking.

“If we want to protect the animals in the most efficient and equitable way where we’re not disproportionately affecting communities that are already living on the margins, we’ve got to bring them in, let them provide their input for the process, really integrate their opinions in policy design. I think we have so much to learn from that, and so many places where we can apply those lessons.” – W&M student Liam McLinda ‘25

Human-wildlife conflict is an escalating global issue, fueled by expanding development, resource scarcity, and the fragmentation of natural habitats. Although the specific species and settings vary, those addressing these challenges have valuable knowledge and experience to share across regions and contexts.

The research in Nepal will guide W&M students Ava Fischer ’26 and Srija Upadhyay ’27 this year in the U.S. The students, with support from W&M mentors Erica Garroutte and  Sapana Lohani, are expanding work with Rinzin Phunjok Lama and Ukali — this time to document knowledge from ranchers about carnivore conflict and resolution strategies employed across the Southern Rocky Mountains. Ukali will share the U.S.-based knowledge with herders and local communities in Humla, Nepal who are dealing with similar issues and assist them with designing and implementing mitigation strategies that balance conservation and community livelihoods.

“For understanding the challenge, the wildlife might be different, the carnivore might be different, but the challenge is always that from the human perspective, ‘that carnivore might come and eat my livestock’ or fear that it might attack people”. – Sapana Lohani, Institute for Integrative Conservation

Great Conservation Needs Great Storytellers

Conservation is a shared responsibility, and the need for effective conservation communication and knowledge sharing has never been greater. Storytelling is a powerful tool for bridging local and global efforts, helping to translate the biodiversity crisis and conservation research into relatable narratives and meaningful action. Storytelling crosses geographic, cultural, and generational boundaries, making complex issues accessible and highlighting the diverse but shared challenges facing wildlife, ecosystems, and human communities. By sharing narratives, we not only share knowledge; we also build connection, context, and collective action.

Emerging filmmaker, Virginia Dare Johnson ‘25, who has found her niche in conservation storytelling, has honed her skills capturing the research journeys of CRP students. Her lens follows classmates across habitats and hemispheres, illuminating the connection between people and the landscapes they inhabit.

“As a conservation storyteller, I’ve learned that building trust and listening deeply are just as important as the final story we share. Telling stories that connect local action to global impact matters to me because it shows how solutions are rooted in place, in people, and in relationships. When we center local voices, we don’t just share facts—we share meaning, and that’s what sparks change.” – W&M student Virginia Dare Johnson ‘25

As a W&M student, Johnson led multiple storytelling initiatives, including a project on Indigenous food systems, food sovereignty, cultural traditions, and ecological stewardship, and a short film documenting student development of a low-cost, DIY water sensor designed to empower even remote communities to monitor their own water quality. Rescently graduating with a degree in integrative conservation and a minor in film and media studies, she pursuing a career in environmental documentary filmmaking and storytelling.

Johnson’s latest video spotlights the local to global emphasis of the Conservation Research Program (CRP) capturing how students leading local scale integrative projects are sharing knowledge that fuels global conservation, and how insights from around the world are shaping efforts here at home. She reveals how the CRP experience has given students a deeper understanding of the human connection to nature and to other people. This story of connection is the perhaps the most important conservation story to tell.

WATCH NOW

“This is one of those kinds of overarching themes I’ve seen in my career. When it comes to wildlife and the environment, there’s no spectators. Everyone plays a role, whether you where you think you do or you don’t. We’re all part of it and we’re all connected to it in one way or another.” – Jordan Green, Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources

Globally Focused Conservation Education: From William & Mary to the World — and Back  

Conservation educators and practitioners are tackling the decline of species, habitats, and genetic diversity at multiple scales, addressing broad global issues such as climate change and pollution while at the same time intensively focusing on localized and species-specific conservation efforts. Local-global conservation connections encourage both re-evaluation of long-standing ideas or methods and the exploration of new ones. These connections reinforce appreciation interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives, making globally focused conservation education vital.

At William & Mary, education is intentionally global, equipping students to make meaningful contributions across borders. The Conservation Research Program experience is transformative for both students and conservation because through hands-on research with global conservation partners, students gain direct experience in diverse ecological and contribute to real conservation solutions. The learn about environmental challenges across cultures and ecosystems, fostering critical reflection on their own positions and responsibilities in conservation. Such education deepens scientific understanding, encourages collaboration, and nurtures a sense of shared responsibility for the planet.

“One of the biggest things this program does is allow for more of these collaborations in the future, not only for the conservation work, but for furthering connections and career mobility for anyone who’s involved in these sorts of projects. It’s the interpersonal life lessons that really made our experience, that will make sure we have those international connections in conservation for the rest of our lives.” – W&M student Kate Marston ’25

The Institute for Integrative Conservation was created to support integrative approaches that balance human well-being with biodiversity conservation and has a mission to empower an inclusive community of thought leaders to create and deliver timely, innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing conservation challenges.

The 2025 William & Mary Year of the Environment highlights W&M’s commitment to healthy ecosystems and communities locally and around the world through programs like the IIC Conservation Research Program. The program is made possible through the generous support of donors, parents, and the IIC community.