My conservation knowledge has been informed by my field work, during which I gained a considerable understanding of wild animal ecology and conservation. As an undergraduate student, I spent a month traveling through Botswana and Namibia, meeting with conservation organizations and learning about how their efforts support the sustainability of dwindling animal populations. Scientists from Elephants Without Borders, the Centre for Conservation of African Resources: Animals, Communities and Land Use (CARACAL), Environmental Watch Botswana, and Botswana Predator Conservation briefed our class on their methods of attaining their goals, results and findings of their work, acquisition of funding, and wider community impact. 

My graduate school advisor, Dr. Dorothy Fragaszy and her colleagues (the National Research Council of Italy’s Dr. Elisabetta Visalberghi and the University of São Paulo’s Dr. Patricia Izar) first documented wild capuchin tool use, and founded the EthoCebus Project and National Geographic-funded field site. in northeastern Brazil. I spent two field seasons (summers 2014 and 2015) conducting in-situ research on wild tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus libidinosus) as part of the EthoCebus Project. My research was funded by the University of Georgia Latin American and Caribbean Student Association (LACSI), which requires a specific level of proficiency in Spanish or Portuguese for financial support. At the field site, I worked closely with interdisciplinary researchers from Italy, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and the United States to collect quantitative and biological data and gained valuable skills with research development, management, and collaboration with international research groups and policies. I collected capuchin spatial and foraging data for my collaborator Dr. Allison Howard, at the University of Georgia. Data collection was rigorous, as my colleagues and I followed the group of 23 capuchin monkeys through thickly forested terrain for several miles a day, over the course of three months. Every 8 minutes, we recorded the location and behavior of all the monkeys seen (instantaneous scan sampling) using geoPDF and Avenza PDF Maps on tablets. At the end of each day, I compiled the data from all colleagues and was responsible for its management in the field. Back at the University of Georgia, Dr. Howard created models to test her predictions about inter-individual distances. Models that included an interaction effect between the activities of two individuals in a dyad best predicted the distance between them. This manuscript has been published in the American Journal of Primatology (Howard, Mainali, Fagan, Visalberghi, Izar, Jones, & Fragaszy, 2017).