Evolving urban wildlife health surveillance to intelligence for pest mitigation and monitoring

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of harm reduction-based health intelligence as the next step in the evolution of urban wildlife surveillance. There are three reasons to evolve urban wildlife health surveillance: (1) proactive steps to reduce vulnerability to health and safety impacts requires an understanding of environments and social structures as well as of the abundance and distribution of animals or hazards; (2) a hazard-by-hazard approach to surveillance causes management to be reactive rather than proactive; and (3) growing interest in urban wildlife ecology, conservation, and welfare plus the growing recognition of the value of urban wildlife for human well-being requires surveillance to be interested in protecting wildlife health as well as human health. Three strategies to help evolve urban wildlife surveillance to health intelligence are; (1) expand from only tracking a single species or a single threat to also tracking factors that increase the vulnerability of the pests and people in a shared urban setting; (2) be integrative and recognize that multiple concurrent harmful things are affecting people, pests and other species in their shared environments; and (3) develop new collaborative approaches to prevent or mitigate persistent harms from persistent pests without eliminating the pests. This article proposes that harm reduction-based intelligence will better equip city planners and pest managers to identify opportunities to act in advance of significant and concurrent harms to people, infrastructure, and wildlife.