Emerging Threat to Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest

Oregon is one of the most respected and established state wildlife health programs in the country. This part of the US has spectacular coastline, vast high deserts, fertile river valleys to forested mountain ranges, containing the most biologically diverse landscapes in the country with many threatened or endangered species of plants and animals.

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Oregon State’s Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) oversees the health of over 900 different vertebrate species. This responsibility includes investigating disease outbreaks that threaten the magnificent animals that call Oregon home. Each animal can be exposed to many disease threats which can require extensive record keeping.  That’s thousands of documents and records per year!

An overload of documents can prevent data organization and utilization that are crucial to maintaining healthy wildlife populations. When data is underutilized or lost, it equals resources lost, and possibly delays in individual or outbreak reporting and possible preventable death.

Integrating and implementing past and current records and data requires more than a simple database to store this information. It requires a database that not only assists in data processing, research, and reporting, but streamlines these processes. VIEW’s Wildlife Health Information System (WHIS) is the only wildlife health platform that creates a profile for each individual animal that is comprehensive, and completely searchable. From these records, disease outbreaks can be detected, monitored, mapped, and quickly reported. In addition, WHIS provides a permanent and secure repository of critical information to allow retrospective studies from years of accumulated records in easy-to-use data spreadsheets generated directly from the WHIS platform.