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Tag: Fish and Wildlife

Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance in California

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Nearly six years ago, when we first set out to create WRMD, we set a few priority goals. We first wanted to provide wildlife rehabilitators with an amazing, simple, and free database to help them with their daily record keeping needs. We also wanted to create an interface to aggregate data across multiple organizations and to allow for the entire community to benefit from their shared data. We wanted a tool that could help wildlife rehabilitators identify emerging wildlife trends and communicate those trends out to a network of rehabilitators and other wildlife professionals. We are proud to introduce the beta release of WRMD Investigator and its pilot program Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance in California!

Thank you once again to those centers who indicated their willingness to partner with us on the Enhanced Wildlife Disease Surveillance project! This week, we are launching the enhanced wildlife disease surveillance system using the new surveillance platform in WRMD.

This system is the first of its kind, to facilitate real-time monitoring of wildlife diseases and mortality events in California wildlife. Information arising from the enhanced surveillance will be made available to the network of collaborating wildlife rehabilitation centers in order to increase awareness of wildlife health events throughout the state.

The new platform to be used for the project aggregates data from our network of partner centers on a weekly basis and detects and alerts investigators to potential unusual wildlife health events (e.g., disease outbreaks). The data to be aggregated from participating centers includes admission date, reason for admission, location found, diagnosis, age, disposition, and clinical signs on initial exam.

WRMD Surveillance Investigator

Depending on the circumstances of the alert, the Wildlife Health Center and CDFW will be reaching out to partner centers to follow-up with collaborative investigations. Please note that this project doesn’t require extra effort for centers and personally identifiable information and information related to treatment/management of cases is not accessible to investigators or partners.

If your center is interested in participating in the study, it is not too late to join our list of partners. If interested, please email Devin at [email protected].

Threats to wild animals are increasing at an alarming rate. There is a critical need for increased monitoring of impacts of these threats on wildlife species, especially species that are difficult to monitor. In California, centers collectively rehabilitate ~ 500 different species of wild animals annually and are uniquely positioned to contribute significant information about threats to a diverse range of wildlife species in the state!

Thank you for your support and please let us know if your center is interested in participating in the study!
Devin Dombrowski, Wildlife Rehabilitation MD Developer
Wild Neighbors Database Project (WNDP)
Terra Kelly, Wildlife Veterinarian and Epidemiologist
Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center
University of California- Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine
Nicole Carion, Statewide Wildlife Rehabilitation Coordinator
California Department of Fish and Wildlife

California’s Region 3 Annual Meeting

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IMG_1142We were invited to speak at California’s Region 3 Annual Wildlife Rehabilitation meeting in the Bay Area. Wildlife Rehabilitation MD is a California bay area native, so we rely heavily on the users that attended this meeting for feedback. The awesome, Nicole Carrion (California State Fish and Wildlife Officer in charge of all the California wildlife rehabilitators), has been promoting WRMD throughout California at all 6 of the regional annual meetings. On November 14, 2014, this time we were able to promote ourselves.

IMG_1140WRMD is working very close with the state of California to try and create a better system for reporting. The more California centers that use WRMD, the more power wildlife rehabilitators will have. WRMD will be creating software that will allow for more real time data so that the state can act quickly on disease outbreaks or trends that are affecting wildlife. It is important to understand that this is bulk data and the state will not access individual records without contacting the organization first. Most importantly we want to make year end reporting less painful and more useful. Currently it is a tedious process for both rehabbers and the state. By using WRMD for year end reporting there is a lot less work for everybody involved with the benefit of more accurate and relevant data.

We would like to personally thank Nicole Carrion and California State Fish and Wildlife for their support.

It is our hope and dream that we develop more relationships with other state governments, like the one we have developed with California. If you are interested in us talking to your state representatives let us know and with your help we can keep this trend going.

Endorsement by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife

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Devin Dombrowski, Nicole Carion and Rachel AvillaOn Saturday November 16th, at the California Council for Wildlife Rehabilitators (CCWR) symposium, Nicole Carion of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CADFW) gave a glorifying endorsement of Wildlife Rehabilitation MD at the opening keynote presentation.

Because of her endorsement, the attention and enthusiasm at the symposium was very positive and numerous organizations have shown interest and are preparing to start the new year using Wildlife Rehabilitation MD.

Over the past few months we have been in discussion with Nicole about how WRMD is benefiting the state of California. It’s a bit premature to say, but we are nearly able to say for the first time in the states history, how many animals were cared for in the proceeding year, in real time.

Not only is she is excited by the prospect of receiving the annual reports more timely, but also by the potential of a single data source aggregating the states data and highlighting patterns. The state will soon be able to recognize mortality events, a rise in migratory species and many other previously undetectable wildlife trends.

We are honored by Nicole’s and the Department’s support.

Thank you once again to Nicole Carion and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife!