EWDA Network Meeting

IMPROVING WILDLIFE MORTALITY REPORTING TO BETTER UNDERSTAND POPULATION-LEVEL DISEASE IMPACT

The ongoing high pathogenicity avian influenza (HPAI) panzootic has clearly demonstrated that the current systems for reporting wildlife mortality are insufficient. Although the current systems usually perform adequately as an early warning for the presence of a disease in a geographical region, they do not allow adequate quantification of disease-associated mortality levels, and therefore it is very difficult to assess population-level effects from the disease.

Therefore, the main goal of this meeting is to bring together the expertise and experience gained from wild bird mortality data collection and interpretation during the HPAI panzootic, as well as from other wildlife mortality events, and to use this information to develop improved long-term wildlife mortality reporting systems from regional to international levels.

We will invite a selection of speakers with expertise and experience in wildlife mortality data collection and analysis, both from the HPAI panzootic but also from other wildlife mortality events. We also will explore how mortality data can be integrated with other demographic information, e.g. annual population counts, to improve assessment of population-level disease impacts. We will subsequently discuss how the knowledge gained can be used to develop more comprehensive wildlife mortality reporting systems to be able to better estimate population-level impacts of future disease outbreaks in wildlife.