Wildlife rehabilitation records for use in ecological research and conservation

Background/Question/Methods

Wildlife face many threats from human activities and human-driven climate change, including hunting and fishing, vehicles, human infrastructure, industrial and agricultural activities, emerging infectious diseases, and extreme weather events. We need to understand the prevalence, patterns, and impacts of these threats in order to conserve wildlife populations. Wildlife rehabilitation (rehab) centers admit and treat injured and sick wildlife, with the aim of returning them to the wild. Wildlife rehab centers collect data on animals admitted, including information on species, condition, location found, and outcome. Past studies have used rehab records to assess threats to wildlife, but these studies have usually covered only a small geographic area, a single species or small group of species, and/or a single category of threats. Here, we use 674,320 digitized wildlife rehabilitation records from 95 centers across the USA and Canada to learn about threats that wildlife face and to assess which categories of research questions can be answered with rehab data. We use these findings to make recommendations to help conserve wildlife populations and improve wildlife health.

Results/Conclusions

We identified key threats by examining conditions causing animals to be brought to wildlife rehab centers. Overall, human disturbances accounted for the largest proportion of wildlife injury and sickness. We identified the predominant reason for admittance for many species: e.g., fishing incidents for brown pelicans, window or building collisions for big brown bats, and vehicle collisions for many raptor and reptile species. We also identified seasonal trends in lead and pesticide exposure. Lead cases peaked in winter, likely due to animals ingesting lead ammunition from shot carcasses after hunting seasons. Pesticide cases peaked in summer, indicating that animals may be exposed when rodenticides are used to control “pest” populations. In examining possible effects of human-driven climate change, we found that more animals arrived at rehab centers in the week after an extreme weather event compared to the week before, but only for certain types of weather events in certain locations: e.g., hurricanes and floods in southern Florida. Overall, we identified several major drivers of injured and sick wildlife arriving at rehab centers. These findings point to possible interventions to help conserve wildlife, such as wildlife road crossings, fishing and hunting regulations, lead and pesticide regulations, and disaster management plans.