Meet the jury seminar: Human–wildlife coexistence in a changing world: surveillance and management of wildlife populations, diseases and zoonoses - 2023

We kindly invite you to join the ‘Meet the Jury’ seminar, featuring international speakers to discuss their research on 'Human–wildlife coexistence in a changing world: surveillance and management of wildlife populations, diseases and zoonoses'.

This seminar will be given by:

• Dr. Oliver Keuling (University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover)

In a changing world, wildlife gets more and more in focus of general scientific and public interest. While human population increases globally, our earth's biodiversity keeps decreasing. Nevertheless, at least in Europe, some species, including ungulates such as wild boar and roe deer but also the wolf, increase in population and recover formerly unoccupied areas. This leads to a close contact of human and wildlife, and thus, to human wildlife interactions (HWI). Many people consider these HWI as wildlife causing problems (to human interests). While not all HWI are problematic, some HWI can pose substantial risks to animal and human health or result in economic losses. Examples include: the Covid-19 pandemic, African swine fever, wildlife-vehicle collisions, and damages to agricultural crops. In this talk Dr. Keuling will share ideas on how we, as humans, can coexist with wildlife without jeopardizing our own interests and needs.

First, Dr. Keuling will focus on the need to monitor wildlife populations. Unfortunately, reliable monitoring of wildlife, especially the common game species, is often difficult. Typically, the only data available on wildlife populations are hunting bag statistics, assurance statistics on wildlife-vehicle collisions or estimates derived from them. Recently, national and international projects that aim to improve the availability of large-scale data on wildlife populations have been launched. Dr. Keuling will talk specifically about the ENETWILD project, an European project on wildlife occurrences, abundances and for coordinating data, scientific projects and establishing census methods. Some of these methods include statistical approaches for spotlight counts, camera trapping and citizen science data.

In addition to improved monitoring of wildlife populations, Dr. Keuling will uncover the need to monitor the different HWIs. In that regard, a better coordination of wildlife-vehicle collisions data sampling has recently been launched on a European scale. Nevertheless, a coordinated monitoring of other HWIs, such as crop damages, is still not in sight. Especially, the improved surveillance of zoonoses and animal-wildlife diseases is of high health and economic interest. In order to succesfully mitigate some of the problematic HWIs, we will not only need veterinarians, biologist, agronomists or forest scientist, but also statisticians, informatics and especially social scientist, given the need to understand the interests of the different stakeholders.

This is a Meet the Jury seminar. Additional information on how to apply for these seminars can be found here.

For whom?

• PhD students and postdocs

When and where?

• December 14, 2023 - 13:30-14:30
• Campus Diepenbeek, Building D, H5

Registration?

• You can register via the following link.

Acknowledged as?

• DS ST: category 'advanced discipline-specific knowledge' - seminar from an external speaker