Help scientists track disease with Wildlife Health Event Reporter

If scouring the shoreline for dead birds is one of your favorite pastimes, there’s a citizen science project just for you.

Beachcombers around the basin can help scientists track potential outbreaks of a disease caused by a dangerous toxin, avian botulism, using the Wildlife Health Event Reporter.

“What we’re trying to do is broaden the core of people who are looking for things,” said Joshua Dein, wildlife veterinarian with the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. “Often what we find is when you have five or 10 dead animals in one spot it gets people’s attention. Where we don’t have a lot of information is dead animals in ones and twos, which may be just as significant.”

The Wildlife Data Integration Network, a partnership between the National Wildlife Health Center and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, put together the Wildlife Health Event Reporter. The tool allows individuals and volunteer groups to report when they see sick or dead birds. Each submission appears on the website’s map.

The network’s first reporter was for national use, but with a grant from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, they launched the Great Lakes one in September 2011.

“We were trying to determine what enhancements to this basic WHER might help stakeholders with botulism reporting,” Dein said. “We added different ways to mark consistent routes so citizen science groups can do beach walks. We also added another section that allows people to describe environmental factors present when they found the animal.

The data helps people track outbreaks in their neighborhood and researchers  control and prevent them.

“We can try to manage it so even if there is an outbreak it will only affect hundreds of birds instead of thousands,” said Cris Marsh, content manager for the network.

Because botulism often spreads when animals eat other botulism-stricken animals, removing dead animals cuts its spread, Marsh said.

Most reports have come from Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula, Michigan’s southern Upper Peninsula and Madison, Wis. But the clusters don’t necessarily mean there are a lot of sick or dead birds in those areas. That’s just where the volunteers are.

“We haven’t gotten a wide breadth of data yet to get a bigger picture,” Marsh said.

Marsh hopes that more volunteers will report what they see as word spreads about the Wildlife Health Event Reporter and that by next year the map will cover more area.