UTILIZING ONLINE DASHBOARDS TO PROVIDE REAL-TIME EMERGING WILDLIFE DISEASE DATA FOR THE PUBLIC | |||
| Taylor M Lewis; California Department of Fish and Wildlife; Taylor.Lewis@wildlife.ca.gov; Molly Jarrells, Liberty Woods, Hannah Shapiro, Deana Clifford | |||
Word Count: 199 The John Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard revolutionized disease communication by allowing the public to interactively visualize cases and spatial disease spread near real-time. Although dashboards have significant potential to provide real-time, digestible updates of emerging wildlife diseases, they have only begun to be utilized by state agencies. Using ArcGIS Dashboards, we developed an interactive, spatially explicit visualization tool to display surveillance efforts in California for rabbit hemorrhagic disease (RHD), a frequently fatal disease affecting wild and domestic rabbits that emerged in 2020 and quickly spread throughout the Southwestern United States. RHD was selected as our pilot disease due to its high pathogenicity, sporadic and under-resourced surveillance history, and strong public interest. The dashboard uses 1,227 citizen reports and 327 diagnostic testing results from 2020-2025, presenting mortality reports and confirmed cases and mortality reports aggregated by county and species, and visualizes the overall test positivity rate of 30%. Effective communication of wildlife disease data depends on maintaining open-source information that is both reliable and accessible to the public in a timely manner. Looking ahead, we plan to integrate a voluntary user survey to assess accessibility and engagement with additional wildlife disease resources to evaluate the effectiveness of this communication approach. | |||
|