Badru Mugerwa
Program: MSc Candidate - Biology & Collaborative Program in Global Health Systems in Africa
Home: Uganda
Supervisor: Professor Liana Zanette
Research Project: Using wildlife’s fear response to acoustic poaching cues to gauge the extent of poaching in tropical ecosystems
Badru’s research focuses on understanding and finding solutions to human-related threats to biodiversity and the environment as a whole. His specific research interests lie in understanding the interactions between human activity and wildlife in human-dominated landscapes, and how this knowledge informs wildlife conservation. For his graduate research, Badru is using a novel method of using wildlife’s fear responses to acoustic hunting cues (e.g. sounds of dogs, human voices, gunshots) through automated audio playback experiments to conduct the first ever-global experimental investigation of the extent of and threat illegal hunting (poaching) poses to wildlife in tropical ecosystems. Badru acknowledges that poaching is a global crisis, hence knowing what resources to dedicate to anti-poaching depends on accurately diagnosing the extent of the problem, and that is precisely what his research promises to provide: a systematic standard means of assessing poaching everywhere.
