Colleen O’Donnell is one of Conservation Nation’s 2024 conservationist grant recipients. Her professional background includes work in wildlife conservation, community-based climate adaptation, wildlife crime reduction, sustainable and wildlife-friendly living, and habitat restoration. She has worked with species and communities in various regions of the world—from the high-mountain peatlands of the Himalayas in Asia and the Andes in South America to forests, mountains, wetlands, and savannahs in Africa.
Colleen has a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s in sustainable development from the SOAS University of London, and is pursuing a PhD in the Environmental Science and Technology Department at the University of Maryland. Her mission is to help reduce one of Earth’s existential threats: biodiversity loss. She is interested in restoring ecosystems via keystone species reintroductions—particularly carnivores—and reducing human-wildlife conflict.
Conservation Without Limits: Saving the Red Wolves
Colleen’s research focuses on the recovery of critically endangered red wolves. Understanding how humans tolerate large carnivores may be key to setting up the red wolf for successful recovery within its historic home range. The Delmarva Peninsula on the East Coast and the Shenandoah Valley in the Appalachian Mountains Region, USA function under different social and agricultural conditions. Colleen plans to conduct surveys to determine if information from locales like these can be used to predict levels of human tolerance toward carnivore species of interest, including red wolves. Ultimately, she hopes to model and map the level of human-carnivore tolerance across the species’ historic range, better supporting reintroduction and recovery efforts for red wolves.
Colleen secured funding for her research from the Washington Biologists’ Field Club but needed additional funds to help her with other essential expenses. Her Conservation Nation grant funding will help bridge that gap by covering travel costs to and from her study site and childcare for her four-year-old daughter. This support will ensure that she can afford the long drives to her survey sites so she can focus on collecting comprehensive and high-quality data. Additionally, it will help alleviate the financial pressures associated with balancing motherhood and her professional goals as a conservationist.
According to Colleen, the funds will be impactful for reasons beyond her project: “Having my daughter see her mother taking action to recover endangered species gives me a great sense of pride, and it secures in my daughter the importance of fighting for a world where both people and wildlife can thrive.”
