[Environment] WILDCOMS-Wildlife Disease & Contaminant Monitoring & Surveillance Network

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Disease and contaminants both pose major risks to wildlife and Man. This is well recognised and there are a variety of surveillance schemes in the UK that monitor wildlife for occurrence and severity of diseases and/or contaminants. These schemes complement rather than duplicate each other but share many operational procedures and so can face similar challenges. The information gathered from each surveillance scheme is communicated to a wide spectrum of end users. The various surveillance schemes are run by different government agencies and laboratories, research centres, institutes and Universities. The funders of the schemes are an equally diverse range of government departments, agencies and industry. A key difficulty caused by this myriad of researchers and funding organisations is that it hampers communication between schemes. The schemes only have opportunistic and ad hoc mechanisms to exchange knowledge or develop common best practices that would facilitate sharing of samples and data. Such cooperation can also be hampered by differences between funders in the priorities that they wish surveillance schemes to address. Furthermore, because each scheme reports its findings largely in isolation, it is difficult for end users to obtain an overview of common or widespread threats. The main aim of this project is to establish a Wildlife Disease & Contaminant Monitoring & Surveillance (WILDCOMS) network. This will provide a partnership between nine current UK contaminant and disease surveillance schemes. The network will foster and facilitate knowledge exchange, harmonisation towards best practice, collaboration and sharing of resources. It will also enhance and widen communication with and between end-users, and in particular will provide end-users with an holistic overview of environmental disease and contaminant risk. This should make identification of emerging hazards and risks easier and quicker to spot, and provide the more integrated scientific evidence base needed to formulate better and timely policy and regulation. The specific objectives, delivered in four work packages, will be: (i) to establish and develop the network through regular partners meetings (ii) to use the network to maximise communication of integrated surveillance information to a wide range of end-users through an annual Stakeholder Forum and through collation of findings from all schemes into web-based quarterly bulletins(iii) development towards harmonised operational procedures (sample collection, measurement, data recording and sample archiving) that will facilitate sharing and collaboration between schemes and eliminate duplication of effort (iv) to develop a sustainable model for WILDCOMS and extend its scope to a European scale through linkage with key European partners and networksWILDCOMS will thus facilitate sharing of skills, expertise, knowledge, samples and data, thereby maximising the use of available resources. This will result in better value for money overall and foster development of new initiatives. The benefits the network will deliver can be summarised as: (a) ntegrated surveillance leading to an improved scientific evidence base with which regulators and policy makers can assess threats to wild vertebrates and human health (b) better long term management, sharing and dissemination of samples, best practice and data (c) a recognised forum that will facilitate discussion and collaboration between surveillance schemes and different end-users and stakeholders (d) an enhanced UK research base by increasing knowledge through scientific publications and greater awareness of activities and specimen archives(e) benefits for industrial end users including potential for averting costs by preventing problems(f) benefits to quality of life to the through improved risk assessment