WHISPers, the USGS-NWHC Wildlife Health event reporting system

The need for a centralized, collaborative network for wildlife disease surveillance is crucial with current emerging and re-emerging diseases affecting wildlife populations, impacting domestic and agricultural animals, and... [ view full abstract ]

The need for a centralized, collaborative network for wildlife disease surveillance is crucial with current emerging and re-emerging diseases affecting wildlife populations, impacting domestic and agricultural animals, and serving as a reservoir for zoonotic transmission. The USGS National Wildlife Health Center in conjunction with federal, state, tribal partners developed the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership event reporting system (WHISPers), a partner-driven online database for recording current and historical wildlife morbidity and mortality events in the United States. The system uses geospatial mapping to depict wildlife events that meet the appropriate criteria from data collected by multiple partners. The criteria includes events with five or more animals with illness or death in a defined geographic location that have also been confirmed by a laboratory, reportable at the county level, and have a diagnosis categorized as infectious, traumatic, nutritional, toxic, or other in origin. By chronicling these events, further understanding of disease impacts on wildlife, identification of emerging diseases and potential spread, and recognition of temporal epidemic diseases can be performed. Data is entered by the USGS National Wildlife Health Center, but a portal for data entry by other wildlife professionals is currently underway. To date, WHISPers has data for over 7,000 events dating back to 1910 from over 43 million affected animals, including over 700 species and 250 diagnoses. The system is continuously updated and as the number of participating partners increases, there will be broader diversity of events. This centralized repository augments the opportunity for both proactive and timely response by wildlife scientists, researchers, and natural resource managers. The data may also serve to alert possibly affected agricultural animal or human populations, supporting One Health surveillance. The use of WHISPers improves the access of data for wildlife morbidity and mortality events in the United States.