Researchers at USGS and specifically at the National Wildlife Health Center are working on developing new statistical and mathematical techniques and packaging them within user-friendly tools.
Some examples of new tools in development are web applications to analyze and interpret complex data, assess risk of future or ongoing disease outbreaks, estimate the effects of disease on individuals, populations, and ecosystems, and evaluate potential management solutions.
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Challenges and opportunities developing mathematical models of shared pathogens of domestic and wild animals
Diseases that affect both wild and domestic animals can be particularly difficult to prevent, predict, mitigate, and control. Such multi-host diseases can have devastating economic impacts on domestic animal producers and can present significant challenges to wildlife populations, particularly for populations of conservation concern. Few mathematical models exist that capture the complexities of pApplying a Bayesian weighted surveillance approach to detect chronic wasting disease in white‐tailed deer
Surveillance is critical for early detection of emerging and re‐emerging infectious diseases. Weighted surveillance leverages heterogeneity in infection risk to increase sampling efficiency.Here, we apply a Bayesian approach to estimate weights for 16 surveillance classes of white‐tailed deer in Wisconsin, USA, relative to hunter‐harvested yearling males. We used these weights to conduct a surveilUsing expert knowledge to incorporate uncertainty in cause-of-death assignments for modeling of cause-specific mortality
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