Issue 3, September 2024

Welcome to the ENETWILD Newsletter! 

ENETWILD is an international network of wildlife professionals focused on integrating wildlife management with pathogens’ surveillance and management. The project is funded by EFSA.

In this newsletter you will stay in the loop on the latest publications and updates in the wildlife world, you will have access to event information and will get to know more about the people involved in the project.

📸🐺Camera trap that shows a wolf pup in Italy

---

Latest publications

🐗  Effectiveness of methods for controlling wild boar movements ⬇️
https://zenodo.org/records/12705762 – ENETWILD Consortium

📋 Knowledge, perception, and awareness of society regarding (over)abundance of wild ungulate populations ⬇️
https://ecologyandsociety.org/vol29/iss1/art24
Piece of news available here

🌡️ Wild boar as sentinel of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever in Spain and Portugal⬇️
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877959X23001620?via%3Dihub
Piece of news available here

🦠 Effect of Myxoma Virus Species Jump on Iberian Hare Populations ⬇️ https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30/6/23-1280_article
Piece of news available here  

---

Upcoming events

---

Updates

While specific contract 1 of ENETWILD come to an end (30.09.24) the second subcontract is already up and running with exiting activities to boost One Health by enhancing surveillance prevention and preparedness when dealing with wildlife related issues.

Several reports released and available on the website.

Check out this report on “Modelling wild boar abundance at high resolution”

---

The EOW has launched the campaign 2024.

40 participants from 27 different European countries have joined it. As a result, densities of different mammal species are going to be estimated in 64 different sites across Europe.

---

Interview

Relax and enjoy this interview with Dolores Gavier-Widén Head of Department of Pathology and Wildlife Diseases at the Swedish Veterinary Agency

Could you start telling us a bit about your role in the project?

I was in ENETWILD from the beginning, since ENETWILD 1, I was part of the management committee.  My expertise is on wildlife diseases and wildlife health. Within the management committee of ENETWILD, I was the coordinator, together with Pika Jokkalainen, of workpackage 5, that was for networking and sustainability of integrated surveillance, and then integrating the health surveillance. 

So, for the first years, ENETWILD was concentrated mostly on wildlife populations, on healthy animal populations. But when EFSA received a mandate from the Commission to work on setting up a coordinated surveillance system under the One Health approach for cross-border pathogens that threaten the Union, then the wildlife health and wildlife disease surveillance came more into play. And ENETWILD did very, very intensive work.  In a short period of time, ENETWILD produced many reports based on extensive literature reviews and on a questionnaire sent to the member states to describe the surveillance systems they had in place. The work was done together with EFSA and its One Health surveillance subgroup of the Animal Health and Welfare Network. 

ENETWILD 1 produced all these reports that contributed also to the prioritization of pathogens that would be taken on for surveillance that was going to be then financed by the European Commission so that the member states could apply for direct grants for the surveillance for these specific pathogens. So ENETWILD had a central role here assisting EFSA to work on recommendations and technical specifications for the surveillance that is now co-financed by the European Commission in many member states. I feel very proud and very happy to have had the opportunity to participate in this work. 

Why does the project ENETWILD motivate you?

I think it is very special and different from projects I have worked with before, which were mostly about infectious diseases. ENETWILD has such a strong focus on wildlife populations and the information about the wildlife populations is so essential to understand the epidemiology of wildlife diseases, and to design optimal disease surveillance and interpret the results. So, they are so well interconnected, healthy wildlife populations, their characteristics, distribution, abundance, behaviour and so on with wildlife diseases. Also, this project offered me the opportunity to meet biologists and others working on healthy animals and on management of populations, which at the end, managing diseases in wildlife means to a large extent managing populations. The opportunity to work hand in hand with wildlife ecologists and biologists was fantastic, really innovative.  

What are some of the key achievements or milestones reached by ENETWILD since its inception?

Very many! (she laughs) To start with, the collection of data on the ecology, distribution, and abundance of the wildlife populations and also the collection of information about disease surveillance. Then, an important achievement was that the wild boar population data collected by ENETWILD has extensive coverage, it has been collected from most of Europe.  This has been a big improvement compared to the data available at the European level before ENETWILD, and very important because the wild boar is a key species in the epidemiology of the African swine fever, both in the maintenance and the spread of the virus.  So, to have these data at the European level, including data from Eastern countries of Europe is an important achievement of ENETWILD. Additionally, ENETWILD also facilitated data submission and standardization, developing harmonized protocols for wildlife demography. These kinds of achievements are very important.

Other key achievements are the construction of this big network that brought together again the animal health part with the animal populations part, and including more parts of Europe that were not incorporated before.

And even another outcome of ENETWILD was the formation of a large network, both geographically and in the disciplines that are represented. ENETWILD and its network increased awareness of the importance of having the population data to be able to decide and interpret results of disease surveillance and for management. ENETWILD is very good at communicating results, as it has a very large production of reports, workshops and a very active website. I think that EFSA, had an important role in increasing the awareness of the need of the wildlife population data for epidemiological analyses, risk assessments and design of disease control strategies among veterinary authorities in the Member States.

What are the potential implications of ENEWILD’s work for conservation and wildlife management efforts in Europe?

There is a very high and important potential here, and I think this is happening already now, ENETWILD is already contributing to conservation and management of populations, knowing what the wildlife populations look like is essential to decide about management strategies. To implement the correct management is to protect the population themselves, and also to protect the health of livestock, it is important to characterize the wildlife-livestock interface where there can be an exchange of pathogens in both directions. It is important to protect free-ranging wildlife populations and, in particular, endangered populations, to preserve biodiversity. The One Health principle states that the health of humans, animals (both domestic animals and wild animals) and the environment is interlinked. ENETWILD contributes to wild animal health and in this way helps to prevent diseases in livestock and humans and environmental contamination with pathogens. Early detection of zoonotic pathogens in wildlife can help prevent emergence of diseases in humans and/or livestock. So, in many ways, ENETWILD is working according to One Health. Indeed, important outcomes of ENETWILD are the data, models and tools that facilitate appropriate management of wildlife and in this way contributes to protect ecosystems, also wild animals are sentinels of environmental health and the environment is a pillar of One Health.

You are also leading a joint internal project in the European Partnership for Animal Health and Welfare, that shares many common goals with ENETWILD. Could you provide us a view of the One Health aspects?

The European partnership has a focus on sustainable livestock production and welfare. So, it’s not strictly a One Health partnership, it is not working directly on human health, but it takes into account zoonoses and AMR. The EUP AH&W does work on animal health and also environmental health through several projects that incorporate terrestrial and aquatic mammals, birds, and fish. So, it is not a classical One Health project, but it works for sustainable livestock health and production and for welfare, and welfare applies also to wildlife. And one of the joint internal projects within the European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare is the “European network for wild mammals and birds”

This project has several different tasks that work on wildlife disease surveillance, wildlife networks, wildlife populations, impact of human activities on disease spread, and stakeholders and policy. It contributes to several components of One Health. 

What would you like ENTEWILD to accomplish in the end? 

I think that all of us working in ENETWILD as well as in other wildlife projects share the vision of healthy wildlife in a sustainable way and in connection with that is the healthy livestock, healthy humans, healthy environment. ENETWILD has already accomplished very much towards this end and continues to develop and produce results.   

Anything you would like to highlight for the readers of the newsletter? 

One message is that, everyone can get involved in this work, because here, we’re working with different disciplines related to wildlife that are brought together in ENETWILD. There are many disciplines related to wildlife health, and it’s important to integrate them. We need not only scientists, but we also need the general public. We use more and more citizen science, more and more reporting systems by different observers… We have good tools, such as Mammalnet and the European observatory of wildlife. Likewise, we want to involve non-professionals interested in wildlife, hunters, breeders, interest groups, NGOs, those working on conservation… anyone interested in wildlife can make important contributions, and we need the contribution of everyone. 

So, get involved! This is a very enriching, and I would also say a very rewarding, experience for those that get involved and at the same time you can contribute to achieving this vision of healthy wildlife.