YUNFENG (CAROL) GE

PROJECT COYOTE INTERN

Yunfeng(Carol) Ge is an intern at Project Coyote from Shandong, China. She is currently a rising senior majoring in Ecology and Evolution and minoring in interdisciplinary environmental analysis at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. She is planning to attend graduate school after graduation and is looking forward to working in the field of ecology and wildlife conservation.

Carol has been interested in wildlife conservation since a very young age. She has been working as both a lab and field technician in the field of behavioral ecology and wildlife conservation, including breeding ecology of Kentish plovers, wildlife-human conflicts in Southwest China, and fire ecology for bird communities.

She also runs an Instagram account (@wustl_nature_explore) to share her wildlife photography and stories. She believes that sharing knowledge and stories about wild canines to public is very important for changing people’s view on them. She believes that conservation is not just the duty of scientists; it requires interdisciplinary collaboration and a change of mindset. In China, the US, and many other parts of the world, there is always a strong bias on wolves and other canines considering them as pest and need to be eliminated. To really save wildlife, we need to really respect nature and understand that there is always a way of coexistence.

As a Project Coyote intern, she is working with Dr. Francisco Santiago-Ávila and Dr. Adrian Treves on a project looking at wolf recovery management in the US. She is helping with extracting and analyzing data from multiple states’ wolf management plans, which aims at revealing potential scientific biases and misinterpretations in these state plans. The results can provide guidance for future wildlife plans on how to propose scientifically accurate policies and strategies.