Transforming Biosurveillance by Standardizing and Serving 40 Years of Wildlife Disease Data

Over the past 40 years the National Wildlife Health center has collected wildlife health information from around the U.S. and beyond, amassing the world’s largest repository of wildlife-disease surveillance data.  This project identified, characterized, and documented NWHC’s locally stored wildlife health datasets, a critical first step to migrating them to new laboratory- and public-facing data systems, such as the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership-event reporting system.  To accomplish this, we developed a systematic, standardized approach for collaborating with laboratory scientists to locate, define, and classify their long-term datasets so that they can be cleansed, archived, and mapped to new systems.  The process we have developed and implemented to define, classify, and cleanse information is being used to produce a guide for creating Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable laboratory data applicable for use across USGS science centers.



Principal Investigator : David S Blehert

Co-Investigator : C. LeAnn White, Neil V Baertlein, Ali H Rahama



Image caption: Map of bat white-nose syndrome outbreaks in the United States from 2015-2020.  Automated online tracking of wildlife disease outbreaks requires well-documented and standardized wildlife health records that can be readily migrated across database platforms.