Student profile

Having spent time developing her fieldwork skills in woods on campus, Katrine Burford-Bradshaw decided to travel further afield for her professional placement, spending a year working on Chorao Island in Goa. Close encounters with king cobras and creeping through the jungle looking for otter poo were all in a day’s work. She also got to grips with setting up camera traps, carrying out GPS surveys and testing water samples for otter DNA. Little previous research has been done on otters, so the data Katrine helped to collect is being used to establish an IUCN Red List database that can underpin approaches to conservation.

Katrine learned that a key challenge is balancing conservation with the needs of the island community, where fishing is a vital source of income: “Otters eat fish and fishermen respond by setting snare traps. On our maps you can see the correlation between where fishermen are and the reduction in otter numbers, so educating the local community is essential. You need otters because they’re a keystone species; without them in the environment, the whole ecosystem collapses.” The ultimate goal is to find a way for otters to survive and thrive in an environment increasingly dominated by humans and, through her research, Katrine is helping to do just that.

“I loved being part of a team that is building a database for conservation and I want to continue with species-specific research.”

Katrine Burford-Bradshaw, Wildlife Conservation with a Year in Professional Practice