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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.

Taylor Lewis is the Mountain Lion Health and RHDV-2 Nongame Scientific Aid at the CDFW Wildlife Laboratory. She has a background in endangered species population management on a range of taxa, from lahontan cutthroat trout to jaguars. She is an early career professional interested in ecophysiology and is excited to debut as a new TWS member. Currently, she is working under Dr. Deana Clifford and Molly Jarrells to help coordinate the riparian brush rabbit vaccination project, as well as support disease and toxin surveillance for wildlife across California.