Willow Neal

Willow Neal (they/them) is a conservation ecologist studying urban woodland butterfly conservation at The Open University, funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council's Central England Training Alliance scholarship (CENTA) DTP. Their research is focused on habitat suitability, management and connectivity of urban woodlands.

Willow is also an associate lecturer at The Open University and is currently conducting research on LGBTQ+ inclusion higher education, along with other work on insect dispersal in Africa, and AI identification and taxonomy of butterflies using their wing patterns that incorporates citizen science and machine learning algorithms.

They were awarded their undergraduate degree in Environmental Science in 2019, and Masters in Conservation Ecology at Oxford Brookes University in 2020, where their thesis focused on metapopulation viability analysis of rural butterflies in fragmented woodland patches with an agricultural matrix.

They started their PhD in 2021 and are due to graduate in 2025.