Listen to Co-founder Rachel Avilla was interviewed on From Rescue To Release; A podcast dedicated to licensed wildlife rehabilitators and the veterinarians who support them.

A new surveillance system tracks trends in wildlife illness and death and could help keep people healthy.

Dombrowski and his wife, Rachel Avilla, are both wildlife rehabilitators who have been working to standardize record-keeping since 2010, when they founded the Wild Neighbors Database Project. They had become frustrated that staffers at rehab centers were using anything from paper records to isolated Excel spreadsheets to track medical records. “When it’s on paper, you’d have to go through boxes and boxes of paperwork to figure out what you gave that golden eagle 10 years ago,” Avilla says

A new early detection surveillance system for wildlife helps identify unusual patterns of illness and death in near real-time by tapping into data from wildlife rehabilitation organizations across California. This system has the potential to expand nationally and globally. It was created by scientists at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine with partners at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the nonprofit Wild Neighbors Database Project.