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.
2024 milestones of ENETWILD
In 2024, ENETWILD achieved significant milestones aimed at enhancing wildlife monitoring and management across Europe:📈👣
- Network Expansion: The recruitment campaign increased the number of study sites from 44 in 2023 to 64, spanning 27 countries. Special emphasis was placed on monitoring areas affected by or close to African Swine Fever (ASF).
- Diverse Habitat Monitoring: Efforts included the inclusion of 25 wetlands and 20 sites near pig farming operations, yielding valuable data on wildlife-domestic animal interactions and potential disease transmission.
- Training and Capacity Building: Two online training courses (Enetwild EOW First and Second Training Courses in April 2024) provided collaborators with essential skills in field protocols, photogrammetry, and data analysis, ensuring consistent data quality. These ensured a standardized approach to data collection and processing.
- Enhanced Collaboration: Regular online meetings facilitated communication and progress tracking among contributors, while networking efforts connected ENETWILD with similar European initiatives, fostering a sense of shared purpose.
- Scientific Output: The publication of the 2023–2024 report highlighted wildlife density data and disease monitoring results, paving the way for future collaborative research papers. Plans for new scientific publications were also initiated.
- Networking and Community Building: ENETWILD participated in workshops and collaborated with European initiatives like Euromammals, Eurocam, Snapshot, and others to align methodologies and build a cohesive European wildlife monitoring framework.
2025 new goals of ENETWILD
As ENETWILD moves into 2025, the project sets its sights on ambitious goals to further its mission of harmonizing wildlife monitoring and management: ✨🛤️
- Completion of Data Analysis: Finalize and analyse the 2024 data, ensuring that insights are shared effectively.
- Advancing Scientific Research: Launch new collaborative scientific publications, promoting the innovative use of ENETWILD’s comprehensive database.
- Strengthening the Monitoring Network: Increase participation by recruiting new study sites in underrepresented or critical regions, such as ASF-affected zones.
- Development of New Tools: Introduce advanced tools for automated data processing and analysis, reducing effort and improving the accuracy of wildlife density estimates.
- Fostering Partnerships: Deepen engagement with European initiatives like Euromammals and EOW to harmonize wildlife monitoring methodologies and share best practices.
- Promoting Harmonized Frameworks: Advocate for policy frameworks aligned with the European Green Deal, emphasizing science-based, transboundary wildlife management strategies.
- Community Engagement: Expand outreach efforts, encouraging citizen science initiatives and public awareness campaigns to foster a collective responsibility for wildlife conservation.
Click above and enjoy the II ENETWILD Annual General Meeting video called “It’s time to initiate proper wildlife management for the benefit of public and environmental health in Europe”.
Latest related publications
🗺️Abundance estimates based on hunting statistics: How far can we go?⬇️
https://www.irec.es/en/publicaciones-destacadas/estimas-abundancia-estadisticos-de-caza
⚖️ The new challenge for hunting in Spain: finding a balance between satisfaction and conservation⬇️
https://www.irec.es/en/publicaciones-destacadas/desafio-caza-equilibrio-satisfaccion-y-conservacion
Upcoming events
The IX European Congress of Mammalogy will take place in the city of Patras, Greece, from March 31 to April 4, 2025. This event is proudly organised by the Hellenic Zoological Society, the European Mammal Foundation, and Mammal Conservation Europe.
- Early Bird Registration and Abstract Submission Deadline Extended until January 24.
The upcoming III meeting of the Iberian Ecological Society (SIBECOL) will be held jointly with the XVII National Congress of the Spanish Association of Terrestrial Ecology (AEET) in Pontevedra, Spain.
The event will take place from June 2nd to 7th 2025, with “Another science is possible: diversity, degrowth, and sustainability in ecological research” as the main theme of the congress.
The eLTER Science Conference 2025 will be holded in Tampere, Finland, from June 23rd to 27th, with “Towards a whole-system approach for ecosystem science” as the main topic.
This international conference aims to advance our undertanding of ecosystems within a pan-European network of sites, platforms, researchers, and stakeholders to facilitate collaborative, inter- and transdisciplinary science including biogeoscience, biodiversity research, and social ecology.
Abstract Submission is open until January 31.
Updates
New year, new ENETWILD channel! 🥳📱
We have opened a profile on Bluesky, where from now on we will share information, news and much more about ENETWILD.
Stay tuned for all the updates of the project by following us on Bluesky:
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So much easier and straightforward!
Interview
Relax and enjoy this interview with Alessandro Broglia, Senior Scientific Officer at EFSA, in the Animal Health and Welfare unit of the Risk Assessment Department.
How would you describe Enetwild’s core mission and its relevance to EFSA’s work?
Enetwild core mission is to give wildlife the right value and place in the One Health picture. Wildlife is a fundamental component in the agro-ecosystem which is the basis of food and food safety therefore extremely relevant for EFSA. And secondly, to connect, create a network of experts and institutions on that field, that allow data collection across Europe, implementation of harmonised approaches and reach the best expertise in each topic.
Since when has EFSA considered wildlife management as an important issue to address and why?
Infectious diseases are shared between livestock, wildlife, humans and environment, but unfortunately wildlife has not always been considered and investigated with the proper importance. Since some epidemics like Avian Influenza or African swine fever started seriously threatening food security, animal and public health, then wildlife fell more and more under EFSA radar.
What have been the main challenges in the monitoring and funding of Enetwild from EFSA’s perspective?
Getting a project about wildlife funded at EFSA was pioneristic at the beginning because the equation wildlife=food safety was not straightforward ten years ago as it may be nowadays. Indeed the arguments to support this were there and it turned that the investment by EFSA was right, projects with broad range of activities and many partners involved, like ENETWILD, are always challenging to be monitored. The key to this is a good sense of trust that should be developed among the partners and between EFSA and the project leaders.
One of the recent challenges or controversies in wildlife monitoring is hunting bans as a measure to stop the spread of infectious diseases. What is your view on their effectiveness and in which cases should they be considered?
Any measure to limit spread of infectious disease in animals should be always seen as part of an integrated strategy adapted to each context and never as a standing alone solution. Hunting ban is one of this: in some cases it might be necessary and may be contributed to disease spread reduction, such as in cases where hunting may disperse animals and with those, also the diseases that they may carry.
What role has ENETWILD played in shaping EFSA’s positions and decisions on wildlife in recent years?
ENETWILD has been an essential contributor to EFSA-s work on wildlife related aspects in the last years. Not only contributing to the scientific assessments, but also, importantly, acting as a window to connect EFSA with the field and reality of wild life.
How does EFSA use the information provided by ENETWILD in its working groups and ultimately in the guidance it provides to the European Commission?
The main role of ENETWILD so far has been to support the risk assessment done by EFSA by collecting and providing data, modelling of wildlife distribution and ad hoc scientific advice on specific topics about wildlife, mainly concerning ASF and Avian Influenza.
Could you highlight any key achievements of ENETWILD that have had a significant impact on the understanding or management of wildlife in Europe?
An example of key achievement by ENETWILD has been for sure the model of wild boar abundance across Europe at 2×2 km resolution, which has served for the risk assessment on ASF, this has been the result of the analysis of different type of data collected from different sources and then synthesised in a unique output, really a great result.
What difficulties does Enetwild face in collecting and standardising wildlife data at European level, and how does EFSA address these challenges?
The standardisation of wildlife distribution data at European level has been probably the main challenge for ENETWILD. The recording of these data in the different countries is far from being harmonised, thus any data model proposed needs to be carefully followed up. Different strategies to automatise the data standardisation have been explored and fine-tuned.
How has ENETWILD facilitated cooperation between scientific institutions and agencies at the international level in relation to wildlife monitoring?
One key expected outcome of ENETWILD is to create, improve and maintain a network of wildlife experts across Europe. This aims at facilitating common activities, maintaining the flow of information and bridging different expertise. This has happened in different ways, e.g. by creating task forces to prepare specific joint deliverables, by organising workshops and meeting at regional and EU level, by training wildlife staff in field activities such as camera trapping.
Can you point to any specific examples where information generated by ENETWILD has directly influenced policies or regulations proposed by the European Commission?
In the latest ASF report produced by EFSA, the contribution of ENETWILD has been fundamental to support us answering the questions related with wild boar. Specifically, ENETWILD did a great work collecting the latest scientific evidence on the effectiveness of barriers to control wild boar populations, including essential information from people from the ground. We hope that this data will be used to update the ASF guidelines from the EC to support countries on the design and build of barriers for controlling wild boar.
How does EFSA ensure that the information generated by ENETWILD is transparent, accurate and useful to all stakeholders, including policy makers and the general public?
EFSA closely follows up and scrutinise the preparation of ENETWILD ouputs, which are then published and accessible in the project website aswell as EFSA website or Zenodo Knowledge Junction. Moreover, the collected data on wildlife distribution are available at regional level resolution through a web application. In this way the data, results, conclusions and recommendations are publicly available and usable by all stakeholders.
What future does EFSA envisage for ENETWILD, and are there any changes envisaged in its role or the way it operates?
ENETWILD has been recognised by EFSA more and more as a key project, in fact its funding has been renewed for the next 6 years. EFSA would envisage for ENETWILD to put wildlife more and more in a One Health perspective as well as improving the communication of the results generated by the project, to reach a wider audience. ENETWILD should be seen as -THE- network for wildlife, where institutions and experts across Europe can discuss and agree on harmonised ways to improve and move wildlife forward.
