Nichole Nageotte

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Manager at Denver Zoo

Humans engaging in outdoor recreational activities can inadvertently introduce salts and minerals into natural environments, attracting wild ungulates to trails and parking areas, which increases the risk of disease transmission and negative human-wildlife interactions. This study aimed to understand the drivers of these interactions and identify p...

Zoo professionals and volunteers frequently face significant emotional strain due to animal losses, yet structured organizational support for processing grief remains limited. This study explores the perspectives of US-based zoo professionals and volunteers on organizational responses to animal-related grief, aiming to identify areas to enhance sup...

Simple Summary Zoo professionals and volunteers care for numerous animals, creating the potential for exposure to multiple deaths and transfer-related losses. Despite this, there is limited research exploring how zoo professionals and volunteers experience and adapt to zoo animal loss. This qualitative study was designed to explore the personal exp...

Museum-based settings such as zoos provide a unique opportunity to engage educators in professional development opportunities. For instance, zoo settings can provide professional development opportunities focused on facilitating learning through a lens of conservation action to promote sustained action by teachers and their students. In this paper,...

As place-based conservation organizations, zoos are in a central position to support individuals in making small changes in their lives that will support the protection of wildlife and their habitats. This paper describes the secondary analysis of data collected from multi-phase front-end, exploratory evaluation that informed the development of a c...

Introduction Burnout and mental health among animal care and health professionals (ACHPs) has received increasing attention in recent years. Despite rapid growth of research in this area, the wellbeing of individuals who work and/or volunteer in zoo settings has received minimal attention. Method An anonymous online survey was created to evaluate...

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is a far-reaching problem with devastating effects on wildlife populations. To engage zoo audiences in environmental behaviors that can help combat IWT, they need to be made aware of what it is, its impacts on wildlife, and how it affects human communities abroad and locally. In fall of 2019, Cleveland Metroparks Zo...

With this article, we describe and analyze the experience of a scientist as she delineated the meaning of scientific inquiry and developed a new professional identity as a science teacher educator. Our inquiry adopted a self-study methodology with a variety of data sources, including sixteen-weeks of journal entries, critical friends’ meetings and...

The primary opportunities for improved conservation and sustainability outcomes are through changing human behavior. Zoos, aquariums, and other public-facing biodiversity conservation institutions offer an important space for environmental learning and facilitating proenvironmental behavior change. We have focused, in this review, on examining comm...

This study used the transtheoretical model of behavior change to categorize participants into stages of change groups regarding eleven conservation behaviors. Three main stages of change were identified: precontemplation, contemplation, and action. Participants from different stage placements were interviewed to explore barriers and motivations tow...

Empathy towards animals is a known influential factor in the likelihood for individuals to engage in conservation behavior, so it is of significant interest that the zoo community considers how to evoke constructive empathetic responses in their guests. To date, much of the research that has been conducted on empathy in zoos has focused on live ani...

This study focused on our teaching efforts in regard to preparing preservice teachers to one day teach children about ecological concepts that many find scary or disgusting. Specifically, we examined the attitudes these preservice teachers had towards certain invertebrates. These attitudes were compared to their self-efficacy towards teaching about...

Dialogue is a critical component of teaching, especially when considering it from a sociocultural theory of learning. An instructor’s knowledge of the subject matter is critical, but not sufficient. The ability to verbally articulate that knowledge while hearing and responding to the developing ideas and knowledge of the students is necessary to fo...