ŽIGA OGORELEC | Science of Survival
SCIENTIFIC COLLABORATION
Before I started working in research, bushcraft and survival were already part of my life — I've been doing this since I was a teenager.
Science came later: four years as a PhD researcher and five more as a postdoc researcher in freshwater biology. From 2027 onwards, as my research project wraps up and I move to Sweden, I’ll be shifting my focus toward bushcraft and survival full-time, but I’d like to bring the scientific side with me rather than leave it behind. A lot of what gets taught, claimed, and repeated in survival and bushcraft circles has never actually been tested properly. That gap between what’s assumed and what’s known is what I’d like to help close.
I’m looking to connect with researchers, institutions and research groups interested in building a consortium around applied survival science, primarily for the purpose of joint funding applications. If you work in a relevant field and see a fit, I’d genuinely like to hear from you — whether that means co-leading a project, acting as a field partner and site for data collection, or just comparing notes on something niche and interesting.
Research directions I'm interested in
These are starting points, not a fixed agenda — I’m actively looking for collaborators to help shape and prioritise them:
Water purification in the field
Including capillarity-based filtration using cloth, sand filtration, distillation of seawater using natural materials or beach litter, and other low-tech purification methods.
Ecological bearing capacity of foraging
How much food a person can realistically extract from a given area before pushing past what the local ecosystem can sustainably produce.
Nutritional value of wild foods
Building a clearer, more rigorous picture of what wild plants, fungi and other foraged food actually offer nutritionally, beyond folk knowledge and rough estimates.
Physiological effects of extreme survival diets
Including protein starvation and high-fibre, low-calorie food intake (like inner bark) over multi-day/week periods.
And more.
Why this matters.
Survival science sits in an odd gap: it’s field-testable, it has real practical stakes, and yet very little of it gets rigorous scientific attention. Twenty years of hands-on survival experience, combined with a research background, gives me both the field access and the scientific training to know what a properly designed study in this space would actually require. I think that combination is rare, and worth doing something with.