Integration of social and ecological sciences for natural resource decision making: challenges and opportunities.

The last 25 years have witnessed growing recognition that natural resource management decisions depend as much on understanding humans and their social interactions as on understanding the interactions between non-human organisms and their environment. Decision science provides a framework for integrating ecological and social factors into a decision, but challenges to integration remain. The decision-analytic framework elicits values and preferences to help articulate objectives, and then evaluates the outcomes of alternative management actions to achieve these objectives. Integrating social science into these steps can be hindered by failing to include social scientists as more than stakeholder-process facilitators, assuming that specific decision-analytic skills are commonplace for social scientists, misperceptions of social data as inherently qualitative, timescale mismatches for iterating through decision analysis and collecting relevant social data, difficulties in predicting human behavior, and failures of institutions to recognize the importance of this integration. We engage these challenges, and suggest solutions to them, helping move forward the integration of social and biological/ecological knowledge and considerations in decision-making.

Species, causes, and outcomes of wildlife rehabilitation in New York State.

Wildlife rehabilitation is a publicly popular practice, though not without controversy. State wildlife agencies frequently debate the ecological impact of rehabilitation. By analyzing case records, we can clarify and quantify the causes for rehabilitation, species involved, and treatment outcomes. This data would aid regulatory agencies and rehabilitators in making informed decisions, as well as gaining insight into causes of species mortality. In New York State, the Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) has licensed rehabilitators since 1980 and annual reporting is required. In this study, we analyzed 58,185 individual wildlife cases that were attended by New York rehabilitators between 2012 and 2014. These encompassed 30,182 (51.9%) birds, 25,447 (43.7%) mammals, 2,421 (4.2%) reptiles, and 75 (0.1%) amphibians. We identified patterns among taxonomic representation, reasons for presentation to a rehabilitation center, and animal disposition. Major causes of presentation were trauma (n = 22,156; 38.1%) and orphaning (n = 21,679; 37.3%), with habitat loss (n = 3,937; 6.8%), infectious disease (n = 1,824; 3.1%), and poisoning or toxin exposure (n = 806; 1.4%) playing lesser roles. The overall release rate for animals receiving care was 50.2% while 45.3% died or were euthanized during the rehabilitation process. A relatively small number (0.3%) were permanently non-releasable and placed in captivity; 4.1% had unknown outcomes. A comparable evaluation in 1989 revealed that wildlife submissions have increased (annual mean 12,583 vs 19,395), and are accompanied by a significant improvement in release (50.2% in the study period vs 44.4% in 1989) (χ2(1) = 90.43, p < 0.0001). In this manuscript, we aim to describe the rehabilitator community in New York State, and present the causes and outcomes for rehabilitation over a three-year period.

WILDLIFE HEALTH AND PUBLIC TRUST RESPONSIBILITIES FOR WILDLIFE RESOURCES.

A significant development in wildlife management is the mounting concern of wildlife professionals and the public about wildlife health and diseases. Concurrently, the wildlife profession is reexamining implications of managing wildlife populations as a public trust and the concomitant obligation to ensure the quality (i.e., health) and sustainability of wildlife. It is an opportune time to emphasize the importance of wildlife health, specifically to advocate for comprehensive and consistent integration of wildlife health in wildlife management. We summarize application of public trust ideas in wildlife population management in the US. We argue that wildlife health is essential to fulfilling public trust administration responsibilities with respect to wildlife, due to the central responsibility of trustees for ensuring the well-being of wildlife species (i.e., the core resources of the trust). Because both health of wildlife and risk perceptions regarding threats posed by wildlife disease to humans and domestic animals are issues of growing concern, managing wildlife disease and risk communication vis-à-vis wildlife health is critical to wildlife trust administration. We conclude that wildlife health professionals play a critical role in protecting the wildlife trust and that current conditions provide opportunities for important contributions by wildlife health professionals in wildlife management.

Surveillance of Wildlife Diseases: Lessons from the West Nile Virus Outbreak.

The West Nile virus outbreak of 1999 revealed many weaknesses in this country's ability to respond to disease threats that cross species lines. There were issues of poor communication among human, domestic animal, and wildlife health agencies that delayed diagnosis; a lack of diagnostic capacity of wildlife agencies at the state level; the exclusion of captive wildlife from any surveillance efforts; an inability to visualize the geospatial relationship between the human and avian outbreaks in a timely manner; and marked disparities of funding levels across agencies. Wildlife has played an important role in recent emerging infectious diseases, and it is clear that a One Health approach will be necessary to respond to future threats. The question is, are we any better prepared to recognize and respond to a wildlife-related emerging infectious disease than we were 14 years ago? Have the lessons of WNV been learned?

Understanding risk perceptions to enhance communication about human-wildlife interactions and the impacts of zoonotic disease.

Inclusion of wildlife in the concept of One Health is important for two primary reasons: (1) the physical health of humans, domesticated animals, and wildlife is linked inextricably through shared diseases, and (2) humans' emotional well-being can be affected by their perceptions of animal health. Although an explicit premise of the One Health Initiative is that healthy wildlife contribute to human health, and vice versa, the initiative also suggests implicitly that wildlife may pose threats to human health through zoonotic disease transmission. As people learn more about One Health, an important question surfaces: How will they react to communications carrying the message that human health and wildlife health are linked? In the absence of adequate relevant research data, we recommend caution in the production and dissemination of One Health messages because of possible unintended or collateral effects. Understanding how and why individuals perceive risks related to wildlife diseases is essential for determining message content that promotes public support for healthy wildlife populations, on the one hand, and, on the other, for identifying messages that might inadvertently increase concern about human health effects of diseased wildlife. To that end, we review risk perception research and summarize the few empirical studies that exist on perceived risk associated with zoonoses. We conclude with some research questions that need answering to help One Health practitioners better understand how the public will interpret their messages and thus how to communicate positively and without negative collateral consequences for wildlife conservation.