Report of the ENETWILD workshop

Abstract

The ENETWILD consortium implemented the EFSA-funded project "Wildlife: collecting and sharing data on wildlife populations, transmitting animal diseases agents", whose main objective is to collect wild boar density, hunting and occurrence data and model species geographical distribution and abundance throughout Europe. This subject is of particular concern due to the vast spread of African swine fever (ASF). In September 2019, the ENETWILD consortium organised a workshop in Croatia for 27 game biologists, animal health professionals, and experts from national hunting and forest authorities from 14 countries from South East Europe. The overall objectives of the workshop were to present milestones and achievements of the ENETWILD project, to review the framework for wild boar data collection and harmonization (hunting, density and occurrence data) of the different countries, as well as to review scientific methods for determining wild boar abundance and density, and to train on camera trapping and the random encounter method (REM). It was agreed that hunting bag data are currently the main source of information, although not always collected within a harmonized framework and rarely accompanied by a record of the hunting effort. Instead, wild boar abundance and density estimates available in South East Europe are unreliable because most of them are not based on scientific methods. Hence, there is a need to implement a novel method for determining wild boar abundance and density that uses hunting bag statistics including measures of hunting effort and efficiency during collective drive hunts, compared against density values calculated using camera trapping and the random encounter method (REM). Several collaborators have declared their willingness to participate in such pilot studies, and all agreed in improving data collection, including by means of citizen science.