Dear Colleagues and Alliance members,
Monitoring wildlife health is a complex and ongoing challenge for veterinarians, wildlife biologists, rangers, epidemiologists and other experts. But what if technology could revolutionize wildlife surveillance? With data-driven methods, we can enhance our ability to collect vital information, enabling earlier detection and timely warnings, especially for emerging zoonotic diseases. Which new tools can reshape how we monitor and protect wildlife health?
To explore these questions, we are delighted to invite you to the upcoming special issue webinar featuring Prof. Dr. Martin Wikelski, who will discuss ‘The Internet of Animals – Early detection of zoonotic diseases’, and Dr. Diego Montecino, presenting ‘Leveraging technologies to expand and improve wildlife health surveillance: SMART for Health and the WildHealthDB’.
Both presentations highlight specific technological advancements for wildlife health monitoring and zoonotic disease detection, particularly using open-source tools. These approaches offer valuable resources for experts to improve data management and deepen their understanding of wildlife health dynamics.
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The Internet of Animals – Early detection of zoonotic diseases
The collective wisdom of the Earth´s animals provides an immense bio-treasure of unprecedented information for humankind. Learning from animals in the ´Internet of Animals´ can help us predict natural catastrophes, forecast global zoonotic disease spreads or safeguard food resources while monitoring in situ every corner of the planet. The evolved senses of animals as well as technical sensors on animal-borne tracking tags enables local earth observations at highest spatial and temporal resolution. To protect and understand the ecosystem services provided by animals, we need to monitor individual animals seamlessly on a global scale. At the same time, these unprecedented life-history data of individual wild animals provide deep, novel insight into fundamental biological processes.
The ICARUS initiative, an international bottom-up, science-driven technology development of small, cheap and autonomous IoT (Internet of Things) sensing devices for animal movement and behavior is aiming towards this: wearables for wildlife. The resulting big data available in the open-source data base Movebank help understand, monitor, predict and protect life on our planet.
Title: Leveraging technologies to expand and improve wildlife health surveillance: SMART for Health and the WildHealthDB
Wildlife diseases are significant threats to global health and biodiversity. Diseases such as avian influenza, white-nose syndrome, injuries from snares, and pollutants are increasingly recognized as urgent conservation issues. These health threats add to the many challenges wildlife face, including habitat destruction, illegal trade, invasive species, and climate change.
Wildlife health surveillance is a dynamic process that monitors diseases, pathogens, and toxins in wildlife. It aims to detect, quantify, and respond to health threats. However, this surveillance is often poorly implemented or entirely absent, even in key sites for conservation and interspecies transmission of pathogens. Data challenges in wildlife health surveillance include inadequate management of information and the lack of standards guiding best practices and to structure diverse data types coming from wildlife health surveillance.
To improve this situation, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has partnered with national agencies and local NGOs of five countries to start wildlife health monitoring in protected areas. This expansion relies on the essential role of rangers, who patrol these areas and contribute to data collection. The integration has been facilitated by SMART—a suite of open-source tools designed to support protected area management. Already deployed in over 1,200 protected areas across 100 countries, SMART allows rangers to use mobile devices to digitally record their observations during patrols and wirelessly transfer this data to central offices. This technology-driven approach enables efficient recruitment of field surveyors and the standardized collection of wildlife health data. The integration of rangers into wildlife health monitoring through “SMART for Health” will be discussed alongside an overview of the project’s current results.
Additionally, the Wildlife Health Intelligence Network is developing a comprehensive data model to manage wildlife health surveillance data for national level programs and research projects. This model is designed to handle diverse types of epidemiological information related to the environment, host species, and health hazards. The model is currently being tested in WildHealthDB, a web-based database developed by WCS’s Health Program. This application is expected to promote best practices in wildlife health surveillance data management and support interoperability with human and domestic animal health databases. The data model, database structure, and future plans will also be presented.
About the Speaker
Martin Wikelski
Martin Wikelski is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (formerly Ornithology) in Radolfzell (Germany), Professor in Biology at the University of Konstanz and member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Previously, he held positions at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama; University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Princeton University. His specialization is the study of global animal movement.
Dr Diego Montecino-Latorre
Dr. Diego Montecino-Latorre holds a Master’s in Preventive Veterinary Medicine and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Davis. With over a decade of experience in wildlife health across terrestrial and marine ecosystems worldwide, Dr. Montecino-Latorre has conducted extensive research and contributed significantly to the development of wildlife health surveillance systems. His work involves close collaboration with field rangers, data managers, analysts, and health leaders within national and international organizations.
Currently, Dr. Montecino-Latorre serves as the Data Specialist and Health Researcher for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Health Program, where he focuses on enhancing wildlife health surveillance in protected areas by integrating rangers in wildlife health monitoring, improving wildlife health data management practices within and beyond WCS, and leveraging open-source data for wildlife health monitoring.
Dr. Montecino-Latorre also leads the Wildlife Health Intelligence Network (WHIN) Data Taskforce, which is currently dedicated to developing a data model that promotes best practices and standardizes the management of wildlife health information generated through diverse initiatives and methodologies.