Listening to what wildlife is telling us: building a more connected approach to wildlife health surveillance

For many years, surveillance systems have been particularly developed around domestic animals. Wildlife presents a different challenge. Animals move across administrative boundaries. They live in places that people may rarely visit and are sometime difficult to observe, let alone sample.

Diagnostic tools are not always designed with wildlife species in mind. Wild animals do not have a clear owner and the people in charge of wildlife can belong to different professional sectors that sometimes seldom connect. Wildlife health surveillance requires specific methods and non-invasive techniques to approach wildlife with minimum disturbance to detect early the signals of what might or might not be a future health or environmental crisis.

Wildlife health surveillance involves field investigations, laboratory investigation and test development, interpretation and communication to a wide range of interest holders.  

At first, a conservationist or an ethologist may notice a population behaving differently. A ranger may find several dead animals during a routine patrol. A laboratory technician may recognise a novel pathogen in a sample. A researcher may find xenobiotics in environmental samples. A hunter, wildlife manager, or any community member may be the first person to notice that something has changed: each person holds a piece of the picture, and this picture becomes meaningful only when those pieces can meet. When these efforts are connected, they can contribute to earlier characterisation, better risk assessment and more informed, data-driven action. 

No single organisation holds the complete picture. 

This understanding helped shape the thinking behind WOAH’s Wildlife Health Strategy 2026–2030. Stronger wildlife health surveillance depends not only on collecting information, but also on creating opportunities for different communities to share it. The Strategy calls for engagement beyond Veterinary Services, including wildlife and environmental sectors, academia and conservation, recognising that wildlife health information is often held across different sectors and institutions. 

In other words, connected surveillance is more than a technical exercise. It is a multisectoral network and trust building exercise. Connection also gives information context, and context gives information meaning.  

How can we bring together wildlife health information that is often fragmented across institutions, sectors and disciplines in a way that creates shared understanding?

Connected surveillance does not mean that every observation must become a diagnosis, or that every unusual event signals an emerging epidemic. An unexplained mortality event is still information, especially when it affects a vulnerable wild species. Similarly, an unusual behaviour or syndrome is still information. 

WildEpi is one initiative that supports this approach. It provides a space for authorised members of a community of wildlife health professionals to share information on health events involving wild species, including undiagnosed and non-infectious events.  

Its value lies not simply in recording an event, but in creating an opportunity for observations to enter a shared space where they can be contextualised, i.e., considered alongside other knowledge and, where appropriate, followed by further investigation or risk assessment.  

Such information can contribute to a broader understanding of wildlife health when considered alongside other observations, environmental information and expert knowledge. A report can therefore begin with an observation rather than a confirmed diagnosis. That distinction matters: surveillance should help us notice what we do not yet fully understand.  

WildEpi is only one part of a wider ecosystem. In addition to this, WOAH’s wildlife health situation reports, its networks of Reference Centres and Collaborating Centres and many partners all contribute knowledge, expertise and contextualisation that help transform information into understanding.

Perhaps a better question is: what might wildlife be telling us that we have yet to consider in an era of increasing environmental complexity?  

A change in mortality may point towards a pathogen or a parasite, old or new. Or pollution. Or nutritional stress. Or habitat alteration. Or, in a poly crisis era, several pressures acting together. A disease detected in wildlife may matter because of its potential impact on a rare, protected species. Or because it signals a change in an ecosystem that will eventually affect human or domestic animals. Or it can reveal a new interface between domestic and wild animals. Or a pathogen that evolved in an unexpected way. 

The promise of connected wildlife health surveillance is that fewer signals are lost between institutions, disciplines and borders. Each observation can become part of a larger body of knowledge. Each expert can contribute a different way of seeing. And each connection can help transform isolated events into understanding. 

The task before us is to become better listeners to wildlife. And when we listen together — across disciplines, sectors, institutions, countries and communities — we may begin to hear not only where disease is occurring, but what changing patterns in wildlife are telling us about the health of the ecosystems we all share.

Main featured image by Gu Ko/Pexels.