PhD in Veterinary Sciences for Animal Health and Food Safety

To respond to the African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreak, which has been involving Europe and Asia since 2007, the Enetwild Consortium, a network of wildlife professionals that work together, on EFSA’s mandate, to provide the basis for integrated wildlife health monitoring, has focused its attention primarily on the collection of wild boar abundance and distribution data, as on other groups of sensitive species such as ungulates and carnivores.

The project has set up the standards of harmonized data collection in Europe by:

• building the inventory of available data through direct contact with local/national stakeholders in EU and non-EU European Countries;
• developing a data collection model (standards);
• data collection through the network and collaborators;
• integration in a common database.

To fill the gaps in data availability, Citizen Science tools have also been developed and promoted (www.mammalnet.net). Mobile-phone applications, camera-trap interfaces and platforms have been developed and are currently fully operative to promote citizens’ involvement and to extend data collection. These tools have been particularly helpful in ASF-affected areas (i.e. Balkans) to report wild boar carcasses and to promote timely carcass testing and removal. To make the harmonization and collaboration effort implemented by Enetwild permanent, the first European Observatory for Wildlife has been recently established.

Overall, Enetwild and the European Observatory for Wildlife have produced a number of tools and resources available to public veterinary and health authorities, as well as to wildlife managers that can be used for population and health management:

• standards for harmonized high-quality data collection;
• density models for wild boar at a continental scale based on hunting-bag data;
• validated methods for density estimation of wildlife through camera-trapping;
• tools for citizen science data collection.

The workshop will focus in how these tools can help to control the ASF focus in Italy.