Dr Daniel Ingram is an interdisciplinary wildlife conservation scientist interested in the sustainability of natural resource use, global food systems, socially-just conservation science and policy, and conservation intervention effectiveness. He also has a penchant for pangolins, and serves on the steering committee of the IUCN SSC Pangolin Specialist Group as a Field-Science Focal Point.
Dan joined the School of Anthropology and Conservation in the summer of 2022 as a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. Prior to joining the University of Kent, he held Postdoctoral Researcher positions at the University of Stirling and University College London. At Stirling, Dan was part of the founding team who established the ongoing WILDMEAT Project which aims to develop an evidence base on the hunting, consumption, and trade of wildlife, to inform sustainable management and policy decisions. At UCL, Dan designed and developed multi-year multi-site field surveys as part of the Biome Health Project funded by WWF-UK, which aims to investigate biodiversity loss in relation to human activities in Fiji (fishing), Kenya (livestock), and Nepal (agriculture and deforestation) using camera traps and acoustic sensors.
Dan is a member of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, and the Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies.
Dr Daniel Ingram’s research typically focusses on the hunting, consumption and trade in wildlife, and he is particularly interested in the socio-cultural and spatial aspects of wildlife use, both in rural and urban areas. Dan’s approach to research is at the interface of natural and social sciences, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods in his work to inform conservation actions and policies.
Dan is the Principal Investigator of a new research programme (starting 2022), investigating Wildlife Consumption in Urban Tropical Africa, with a £1.2 million investment from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). This new programme will integrate conservation science, environmental psychology, behaviour science, systems science, and health studies to quantify urban wild meat consumption patterns, and provide a deeper understanding of the factors that shape decision-making by urban wild meat consumers to inform conservation interventions.
Dan’s work typically focusses on the following research themes:
1) Wild food systems: Food-Health-Environment nexus: This theme encompasses research that investigates the joint environmental and health implications of wild food consumption, and how wild food integrates into broader agricultural and domesticated food systems. A key aspect of this theme is working towards the sustainability of wild food systems in socially-just ways, particularly the harvest of terrestrial and aquatic animals for food (e.g., “wild meat”). Research within this theme includes the spatial dimensions of urban food insecurity, the health implications of hunting, consuming and trading wild animals both positive and negative, such as nutritional intake and zoonotic disease risk. As part of a collaborative group of researchers and conservation practitioners, Dan is also working towards developing standardised and rigorous methods to monitor wildlife use, as well as indicators to track use to aid policy decision-making.
2) Social and cultural roles of wildlife in human societies: Within this theme, several topics are explored from the social and cultural reasons why urban people consume wildlife, to the role that wildlife plays in religions, ritual arts, and the lives of traditional and indigenous communities.
3) Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) of terrestrial and aquatic wildlife, including animals and plants. This theme focusses on the blurred lines between subsistence and commercial trade of wildlife (where illegal), as well as on the trade in wildlife across continents. Pangolins feature heavily in this theme.
4) Wildlife monitoring and natural history: Research within this theme covers detecting and monitoring wildlife using different conservation technologies, and monitoring how wildlife populations respond to different levels of threat in order to identify key points for conservation intervention. Dan is particularly interested in the challenge of monitoring arboreal and burrowing mammals and reptiles using camera-traps. Over the past nine years, Dan has been working on pangolin research and conservation, and research within this theme often focusses on pangolin natural histories.
A full list of publications can be found here.
Undergraduate