WHISPers
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Abstract
The Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership event reporting system (WHISPers) is a partner-driven, web-based repository for sharing information about historic and ongoing wildlife mortality and morbidity events. The primary goal of the system is to provide natural resource management partners and the public with timely, accurate information on where wildlife disease events are occurring or have occurred for better preparation and decision making. WHISPers is one of the core databases used by the USGS National Wildlife Health Center (NWHC), which is the only national center dedicated to wildlife disease detection, control, and prevention. In the future, data in WHISPers will likely be populated by hundreds, if not thousands, of natural resource management professionals who seek services from the NWHC or want to collaborate and easily share information across political boundaries. Data in WHISPers are used by the Department of Homeland Security’s National Biosurveillance Integration Center, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and will soon be set up to alert the top echelon of the U.S. Department of the Interior regarding wildlife health events on federal lands; it is likely that more national and international surveillance and research organizations will use WHISPers alerts in the future to increase situational awareness of diseases in wildlife.