 Hello, I'm Dr. Pat Klein, the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee attending veterinarian and national program lead for Fish and Wildlife Health for the USDA Forest Service. I'm delighted to be your moderator for Session 3, Wild Animal Population Concerns. In this session, we will discuss the impacts and potential consequences of the risks of introduction and spread of pathogens to natural systems during wildlife field research activities, and the importance of biosafety and biosecurity to be considered by the PI, the IACUC, the Occupational Safety and Health, or Environmental Health and Safety or EHS committees. And in this overarching discussion on biosafety, biosecurity, and biocontainment germane to ecosystems and natural communities, we should recognize how this pertains to the One Health concept, that we are all interconnected, humans, domestic animals, fish and wildlife in our shared environment, as depicted here by Edward Hicks in his painting, Peaceable Kingdom. We all breathe the same air, rely on common water sources, and inhabit shared landscapes to coexist. But we must endeavor to minimize the risks of infectious and zoonotic pathogen transmission between these populations and interrupt potential disease cycles through biosecurity best practices. So let's take a moment to define and clarify how biosecurity and biosefety are complementary in purpose and in actions. Biosecurity is a means to prevent or reduce the risk of introduction of an infectious agent to naive populations by the movement of personnel, or animals, vehicles, even carcasses and other materials. While biosafety is the prevention of large-scale loss of biological integrity, focusing both on the ecology and the human animal health. Both will prevent or minimize the further spread of pathogenic agents within and between populations with a desired outcome to protect you, other people, and animals from harmful agents. We need to understand the basic principles of biosafety and biosecurity in order to implement best practices. So having situational awareness is to understand what hazards, including biological hazards and pathogens, may be present in the natural environment in which you will be working or in the animal population. What are the risks that might result from your activities and how best to mitigate those risks? You need to plan before you act and to use practical and systematic practices. This includes knowing the routes of exposure and transmission of existing pathogens and or those that could be introduced by your activities. This can be via direct contact, ingestion, aerosol, or vectors. And with this information, you can develop risk mitigation measures using various tools, such as the hierarchy of controls or risk assessment processes such as a job hazard analysis and determine the appropriate level of personal protective equipment or PPE that is necessary. Of course, this requires constant training and vigilance to be proactive and take personal responsibility to assess your risks. One broadly recognized risk mitigation method commonly used in the veterinary and public health communities is the hierarchy of controls. It was developed by the CDC National Institutes of Occupational Safety and Health as a risk assessment tool for critical thinking to identify and mitigate health and safety risks. This diagram depicts how the control parameters are ordered from least effective at the bottom to most effective at the top. Note that PPE is effective, but can fail if it's not used properly. So using PPE by itself may not suffice or provide adequate protection unless it's incorporated with the other administrative and engineering controls. The only way to completely reduce a risk to zero is to eliminate that risk or hazard. This may not be possible in natural settings, so the hierarchy of control tool provides a comprehensive assessment to minimize risks using an integrated set of control measures. One key aspect of biosafety and biosecurity in wildlife field work is to compare the occupational safety and health practices developed and implemented for biomedical laboratories and consider how to best extrapolate those principles and practices to natural field settings. In biomedical research facilities, there is a planned facility design and an infrastructure with lab animal specific caging systems. This also includes the controlled environments for lighting and temperature, humidity and ventilation, and the laboratory or research animals are generally domestic species that are bred for research purposes. But compare and contrast this to natural field settings where the facility is the natural environment and the research animals are free-ranging wildlife in their natural habitat. The wild animals infectious or zoonotic disease potentials are often undefined or unknown or untested. This is why it is essential for the occupational safety and health or EHS programs and the ICUC to be collaborative partners and work with the PIs in determining best biosecurity and biosafety plans for wildlife research activities. This brief overview and background has been a good preface for the session three objectives in which we will consider potential impacts on populations and communities beyond the level of the individual animal that can result from field activities and to recognize that biosafety is multi-directional between animals, humans and the environment. We will discuss the responsibilities and limitations of permitting and regulatory agencies and ICUCs regarding oversight of potential impacts. Our speakers will highlight the dynamic, complex and office dangerous risks in wildlife research activities, the risk of introduction and spread of wildlife diseases by field researchers and impacts on biodiversity and species conservation. Also the importance of dialogue between the PI, the ICUC, the Occupational Safety and Health and EHS committees and the need to develop standards of practice around biosecurity or biosafety and animal welfare. I trust that you will find the presentations in this session to be insightful and elucidating. Please don't forget to submit your speaker questions via Slido and we hope you will attend the live end of day session to hear key take home points from all the session moderators of that day and the Q&A responses to selected questions received during the recorded presentations. Thank you very much. Good day, folks. My name is Christopher Parkinson. I am a professor in biological sciences and in forestry and environmental conservation at Clemson University. I'm also the former ICUC chair at the University of Central Florida. I'm currently the HERP chair for the American Society for Ictheologist and Herpetologists. I want to thank Robert Sykes and Anne Maglia for inviting me to talk today and also Patty Klein for chairing our session. I'll be talking about the challenges of hygrous fieldwork and then working with venomous snakes. My goals for today's talk really is talk a little bit about non-traditional study systems. I want to define the field, how the Animal Welfare Act actually handles field studies programs, talk about risk management. I am a very big proponent of field safety programs and then actually working with venomous snakes both in the field and in captivity. At many universities, ICUCs are having to deal with non-traditional study systems and most ICUCs are not set up with a wildlife person or multiple wildlife individuals or members on the committee. And so it is commonplace for folks to really understand the biomedical research agenda, but not understand and get how we do fieldwork and working with non-traditional animals. We're also bringing a lot of non-traditional systems into the lab. For example, in the upper left, bringing in endangered frogs to be bred in captivity. My group extracting venom, working with sea turtles, doing morphometrics on iguanas and then being in the field and capturing field animals. And so today we want to talk a little bit about these systems. So where is the field? You know, basically when I was thinking about this group, I started to really rationalize where the field is. And in my view, it's anywhere that you're not in an office or a laboratory setting. The difference is a controlled versus a non-controlled environment. So my team here working in the lab, working with the computational aspects, versus working what most people consider the field. So here my team and I are all over the world, multiple countries. I've worked in 20 some odd countries. And all of these photos show a risk, but the field can be on the campus of the University of Central Florida where I spent 17 years. And in the wildlands that are on campus, we had a great population of eastern Diamondback rattlesnakes. So it was commonplace for me to get called by the UCF police because we had a rattlesnake in a parking lot. And so the field to me is anywhere you are that is outside of that office or in a laboratory setting. As I mentioned with the UCF rattlesnake project, you see here more urban ecology. These photos are from the Atlanta Coyote Project where they have folks working on coyotes in Atlanta proper or from Jay Lynn's lab up in Chicago where she has her students working in cemeteries and also in parks on coyotes. And so you're starting to see the field being right outside some universities in downtown suburbia. And this brings a whole nother aspect of risk when going into the field. So how does the Animal Welfare Act deal with field studies? Well, in 2005, that amendment included field studies on that are conducted on free living wild animals in their natural habitat. But it gave a qualifying statement. If they are not invasive, if the study does not harm them or material alter the behavior, then they're exempted from AWA and IACUC oversight. Now, some IACUCs at different universities take this differently. I've worked at two different universities of late. One said all programs that are dealing with animals have to submit an IACUC. Another was if you were following the AWA, you don't have to submit an IACUC. But this also pertains to captive wildlife and wild animals held in captivity for more than 12 hours. So in a lot of projects, researchers bring animals into the lab for an overnight stay to conduct some work. So therefore, those are covered by the AWA. Also, especially for venomous and wildlife animals, there are federal and state laws, there are policies and guidelines that we have to follow. And there are local laws and ordinances dealing with venomous snakes. So we have to follow all of these when we're carrying out our wildlife work. Now, a field safety program I think is essential in an IACUC and a university setting. And I believe the same level of planning and discussion that goes into lab safety should be considered when planning field work. We need to do job safety analyses. We've got to identify safety risks and hazards in the workplace, out in the field environment. Many of us PIs, we don't think about that when we're talking to our students and explaining what they'll be doing in the field. And so we need to evaluate that risk. We need to see how the field worker and the environment interact or the tools and tasks. We're getting a lot of students today that really haven't done work in the field. And so they don't understand what risk can happen. So we have to figure out what can go wrong prior to it going wrong. And we can't assume that field people really understand all that risk. If I don't take my students into the field, I might have a hard time and a difficulty gauging that student's ability in a field study. And so I need to be out there and be evaluating how well that student is doing in the field. And realize these risks are not unique to biologists. If they're doing field work in the urban setting, a sociologist is having the same work or an anthropologist is having that same risk. So we have to work together to figure out the risk. So in all of these photos here, an accident occurred or was about to occur. So in the upper left, those three individuals were caught out at night because of a rainstorm in Arizona. And a mountain lion actually came very close to them and was tracking them. Below that, there are jaguar footprints. That happened to me on a beach in Costa Rica where I was tracked by a drag wire. People using ATVs, many, many accidents have happened in small planes while doing field work. And on the right, one of the easiest helps for communication is satellite phones. And here I am checking in with my director of environmental health and safety because he and I worked the deal for him to provide satellite phones to my team and other members of the university. So how do we mitigate some of those risks? Well, obviously we need a medical surveillance program. We do health profiles on team members. We make sure they know what vaccines and immunizations. We always carry emergency medical kits and we carry medicines to deal with allergic reactions. Training, having all your students have wilderness first aid training, have ATV, UTAV, or boat training if they need to, in that communication plan. A great deal I struck was working with REHS. We bought a bank of satellite phones and then we would loan them out to researchers who needed them. I've been in a city in an area where cell phones don't work and that satellite phone has come in really helpful. And the researcher then pays for the minutes used and sometimes we don't even use minutes while we're in the field. Last and not least, we need to have a field evacuation plan if something goes wrong because it very well came. Something that's not my area of expertise but risk mitigation dealing with zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. Every year researchers catch, or it's been shown that researchers catch hantavirus or the plague from doing small mammal trapping, rabies can be transmitted easily. Tick-borne disease is probably the most common that researchers have to deal with especially if they're in the field up in the northeast, Lyme's disease is high. And then mosquito-borne diseases, dealing with malaria or dengue. Some of the places in Honduras and Costa Rica and Panama, I've had to deal with these. And just mitigating them using often other chemicals to deal with those. But we have to make sure we mitigate that risk and that the researchers and their students understand the risk. And so it's that communication. An article was published last year in BuzzFeed, describing sexual misconduct actions and harassment that has occurred to numerous people at the Smithsonian's Tropical Research Institute in Panama. If you've not read this article, please go find it. It will sicken you. But it brings to light things that do happen in the field. I bring this up because none of the trainings that I have ever undertaken included this aspect in terms of field work safety. For me, that will stop. I will now always be an ally training in terms of training. Bringing this up, making sure my students understand the risks of doing field work when it comes to discrimination, sexual misconduct. And I implore that all of you do as well. A great article was published last year as well by some Cornell graduate students. And if you have not read the previous article or this one, I really ask that you do so. What this is is safe field work strategies for at-risk individuals. They're supervisors and they're institutions. Making sure we start a conversation trying to identify prejudice. We know some individuals because of the color of their skin, their gender, their sexual orientation are more vulnerable to conflict and violence when they're in the field. And we've got to work hard to make sure that everyone deserves to conduct field work safely. And frankly, I've not included this or seen it included in a lot of my trainings. And from now on, I will be talking about this and making sure that people are aware at the risk involved. So remember, the basic thing is basic situational awareness. We need to plan, we need to prepare for risks and hazards. We need to implement risk mitigation measures. Make sure we have correct PPP, PPE, vaccination vector control. It's all about training and communication. We need to promote a culture of prevention for dealing with field work safety. It's especially true when we're working with venomous snakes in the field. The last quick thing I want to mention in dealing with this is that we field researchers don't want to be the vector and we'll have two talks later today on this dealing with ways to not be the vector. When people are in the field, ISECs need to ask them how they're going to clean and disinfect their tools moving from place to place. We don't want to carry vectors between field sites. And so please make sure you start asking those questions. So we want to talk a little bit about non-model lab considerations. Because there's a lot of things that are different. Husbandry, housing, feeding, vet care, occupational health and safety. All of these things are very different when we bring wildlife into the facility. We need to plan, plan, plan. We need to get the facility folks on board. We need to get EHS on board. Our IACUC needs to be integral and we need to write and work on a lot of SOPs. We need to make sure everything we do is covered under a standard operating procedure. Have protocols in place. When you're unsure, ask the expert. As the chair of the ASIH herpetologist group, I get a lot of calls from or emails from IACUC chairs asking how to work with their wildlife researchers. And I connect them to experts in the field. So just ask for that help. But for the remainder of the talk, I want to talk about utilizing venomous snakes in research. We've worked in over 20 countries, you see on the left, we do a lot of field work collecting animals for our genomics and venom work. On the right, you see ret cleaning cages in our room. We use tools all the time, we never actually physically handle the snakes. We use snake hooks and as you see in the next slide, acrylic tubes to move animals around. But there's always two people in the room at all times and in the field there's always multiple investigators at the same time. We have a special snake room at Clemson within the animal facility. It's behind multiple card key access doors. We are responsible for all the cleaning and maintenance within the room. We handle and deal with all the cleaning of the cages for the animals. You can see they're kept in rack cages, we have multiple ones now. But the room is an open space room, so we can deal with each individual snake safely. On each cage, we have our animal welfare protocol. My name, the species name, what antivinino it would take. Here on the right is a picture of just a corn snake. It's the one with the white card non-venomous, above it is a venomous. So it automatically identifies a risk. Here, one of my team is what's called tubing a snake. They're using an acrylic tube to get the snake to go up into so they can then extract venom. We don't manhandle snakes. I would say 99% of the time, we never physically touched the head of the snake unless something very weird or vet procedure has to be done. And a lot of times we will anesthetize the animal to do that. So we reduce that risk. So how do we work with venomous snakes and captivity as safely as possible? The first thing we did was we partnered with a local emergency medicine physician. And then we brought in a snake bite specialist who's in Houston. Made sure those two physicians were on the same page. We brought in our local fire and EMS folks. We set up SOPs. We designed a designated meat site right outside our facility at the loading zone. Because many EMS folks are deathly afraid of snakes and would not come into the room. We have then set up snake identification and outreach programs for them to help educate our EMS folks. So final considerations, I truly believe the same level of planning and discussion that goes into a lab safety protocol should also be done in a field safety protocol. We need to communicate. We need to build partnerships, collaborations and we need to document everything. The investigator, students, department, university, EHS and the IACUC all need to work together because the research is very important and we need to be able to do it safely. We can mitigate that risk. It's training conversations and then we implement it. And last but not least, truly everyone deserves to conduct field work as safety as possible. Thank you. Please reach out to viperatclemsen.edu if you have any questions. Thank you. Hello, I'm Jonathan Reichard. I'm a wildlife biologist and the US Fish and Wildlife Services Assistant Coordinator for White Nose Syndrome. Today I'm going to share some information about how our international collaborative effort has produced standards of practice that facilitate research and management of white nose syndrome in bats. I'll start with a very brief overview of white nose syndrome. This disease of hibernating bats is caused by the cold-loving fungus pseudo-gymnoascus destructans or PD for short. PD is new to North America where it has been spreading rapidly through native bat populations. Since 2007, PD has also been detected among numerous species across Europe and Asia and molecular analyses point to Europe as the likely origin of the fungal isolate that's now abundant in North America. At least 12 North American bat species are known to be susceptible to this disease. PD invades their skin while they're in torpid states and conditions are sufficiently cold for the fungus to grow. Although there's variation in impacts among species, for many of them white nose syndrome is often fatal. Therefore, white nose syndrome is a major management concern for wildlife agencies across the US, Canada and Mexico. In 2007, wildlife biologists in Cavers reported large numbers of dead bats found in caves and mines during winter near Albany, New York. Second-dying bats had a white fungal growth on their faces and wings, something that had not been reported in scientific literature previously. Here, the different colors for each county represent the annual expansion of white nose syndrome since 2007. At the time of its discovery, the cause or causes of bat mortality events were mysterious, but as white nose syndrome has continued to spread, a dedicated partnership of scientists and managers has made great strides improving our knowledge of the pathogen, hosts and disease. Our progress has been made easier by initiatives of this partnership to evaluate high priority activities to investigate and manage the disease. And evaluate the risks these activities may pose to the bats we were working to protect. Since then, white nose syndrome has been a dominant topic at regional bat working group meetings across the country and the Fish and Wildlife Service convenes annual symposia or workshops to share the latest scientific information and coordinate activities to manage the disease. Because little was known about white nose syndrome and what was causing it, our early focus was to develop standard approaches to address the critical information needs. We modeled our response on existing efforts for chronic wasting disease and colony collapse disorder as we developed collaborative strategies to slow or stop the spread of the disease, track its occurrence and impacts, and identify management strategies for affected bats. When white nose syndrome was first discovered, it was unknown if it posed a threat to other taxa or people. As a result, research conducted through agencies and institutions treated the situation with a high degree of caution. Laboratories working with disease specimens were required to meet the standard of biosafety level two or higher. Many researchers were required to don N95 or HEPA filter masks in caves, face shields and full body PPE with Tyvek and gloves. All materials leaving caves and mines in the white nose syndrome affected area were treated as biohazardous material. And partnering animal care and use committees quickly reviewed protocols adapted from other systems to approve studies into this emerging disease. These systems were effective in permitting important research to proceed, but the white nose syndrome response community quickly identified additional needs to refine some precautions. The first disinfection protocol was developed largely from a human safety perspective since we were originally unsure what pathogen we were dealing with. At the time, we referenced disinfection protocols for other wildlife diseases like conjunctivitis in house finches and identified bleach solutions, quaternary ammonium and simple green 24 for cleaning gear used around bats. Through the white nose syndrome response community, this protocol was quickly adopted by scientists and managers across the continent. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also issued a cave advisory recommending restricting access to caves and mines used by bats. The objective of this action was to reduce further disturbance of sick bats and limit interactions between people and the pathogen. These two tools, the decontamination protocol and restricted access to bat hibernacula, remain important management tools in use today. 2011 states, tribes and federal agencies came together under the formal framework of the National Plan for White Nose Syndrome. This document outlines structure, coordination, and priorities to address the threat of the disease moving forward. The collaborative response team now has partners from over 150 agencies, organizations, and institutions. Partners in the Northeast contribute with perspective of an endemic wildlife disease in their bat populations while others in the West contribute with anticipation of how their bat populations will respond when PD arrives there. Through the national response, we've developed numerous recommendations and practices to guide work on White Nose Syndrome. Many of these efforts fall under a variety of regulations and policies that affect animal welfare. For example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforces the Endangered Species Act and we evaluate potential impacts to any listed species when making grant decisions or issuing permits for White Nose Syndrome research and management activities. We also review these activities for compliance with NEPA and NHPA to assess impacts to the environment and cultural resources. State agencies make similar assessments when issuing wildlife permits and conducting work under their own management authorities or ACU permissions. The White Nose Syndrome-specific standards of practice developed through the national response provide a baseline by which various partners can adopt White Nose Syndrome-specific measures for biosafety and readily apply these standards in their research and management plans. These established practices improved efficiency and consistency to make great scientific progress for bat conservation possible. Researchers from federal, state, and non-government organizations made quick progress. They tested and satisfied Koch's postulates to establish the Pathogen Disease Link between PD and bats. They developed robust diagnostic and surveillance tools to understand physiological responses to infection and detect PD at minute levels in the environment, and they conducted a wide variety of studies to estimate variation in susceptibility due to behavior, physiology, and other variables. Ever-increasing knowledge about White Nose Syndrome and PD has allowed us to refine and improve some of the early precautions developed. For example, with more knowledge about how bats respond to PD infection and how PD invades locations, managing access to caves to protect bats can be done more strategically. We've also adapted these recommendations for use in showcase that house bats so that these important commercial and educational resources can continue operating while also reducing risks to wildlife. The White Nose Syndrome decontamination protocol has also been updated multiple times since early versions with bleach and quaternary ammonium. Most recently, the U.S. Forest Service conducted efficacy tests of a variety of disinfecting agents and processes, which now provide options for disinfecting a wide range of items used in caves and mines but without risking damage to expensive technology or safety equipment. As it's now clear that some bats survive the worst outcomes of disease, we've identified other stressors that can be reduced by applying similar standards for protecting bats. To that end, we've adapted our practices for decontamination and disturbance for other user groups like wildlife rehabilitators and wildlife control operators. One of the primary goals of the National Response to White Nose Syndrome is to develop and deploy tools that reduce the prevalence of PD in the environment and bolster bats' abilities to survive infections. However, there are many steps needed before any effective tool can be safely brought to scale. In 2015, we convened a workshop of specialists who would be involved in testing and using these tools. We assembled around common determination to find an effective treatment for white nose syndrome. We outlined key metrics and steps important to the research and development process. One outcome of this workshop was agreed on and agreed on path to sequentially advance developing treatments from conceptual plans to laboratory testing in situ and in vivo, to field testing and eventual broad implementation. We agreed on a common understanding that knowing non-target effects is a priority so that we did not waste time developing tools that would be harmful to other taxa or the environment. Ultimately, documenting a treatment's performance through these steps would not only demonstrate its potential utility but would also facilitate presentation of information needed to navigate required regulatory review. These guiding principles in mind, researchers have identified a variety of agents that can kill or stop growth of PD or improve survival of bats. Multiple tools have been sufficiently tested for efficacy and non-target effects to demonstrate they're ready for adaptive use in the field. Some examples are depicted here with a Cold War era bunker modified to be a cleanable hibernaculum, a spray of polyethylene glycol to hinder growth of PD in an abandoned railroad tunnel, and a couple dozen marked cave bats that are part of a vaccination trial in Texas. Unsurprisingly, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 disrupted many activities for managing white-nose syndrome. Bat biologists had many questions about the potential impact of this new virus on native species, and there was little information about the potential for spillback into native populations or whether animals could become sick or harbor a new reservoir for the virus. With the example of PD still moving so quickly and dangerously through North American bat populations, there was a serious concern about what added impact SARS-CoV-2 might have on our bats, but we knew important work on white-nose syndrome was still needed. The partnership of the White-Nose Syndrome National Response Team was well positioned to quickly adopt the best available precautionary measures to allow us to move forward with bat conservation work despite these uncertainties. In June, scientists from USGS and US Fish and Wildlife led a rapid risk assessment which determined that there was a non-negligible risk that bats could become infected with SARS-CoV-2 from sick people conducting bat work. This finding reinforced the need for agencies and researchers to take precautionary measures while conducting work with bats. As we gained knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 and ways to reduce risk of transmission, the bat management community moved quickly to enact the most current and appropriate precautions. Similar to guidance from CDC and others, the bat specialist group of IUCN developed specific recommendations for preventing human to bat transmission of SARS-CoV-2. These recommendations remain an important resource for planning safe research and management activities for white-nose syndrome. More recently, a more in-depth risk assessment of the potential risks to bats posed by SARS-CoV-2 was conducted. In this case, it was determined that screening field personnel for COVID is an effective way to reduce risks of human to bat transmission, but also that bats suffering from white-nose syndrome have a higher risk of becoming infected from a sick person than do healthy bats. Thus, over the past two years, early action by the White-Nose Syndrome Partnership to adopt safety measures amidst rapidly changing and uncertain risks may have helped to avoid a major setback in our bat conservation efforts. White-nose syndrome has decimated several North American bat species in the past decade and a half, while conservation biologists work together with shared strategies for reducing risks to bats have made great progress in managing the disease and the bats affected by it. There's a long road ahead for these species to recover. Other threats like pollution, habitat modification, intentional harm, climate change, and energy development also pose threats to bats. Addressing the science and management needs of these threats will benefit from agreed-on standards of practice, develop to facilitate necessary activities while maintaining safety for the animals we seek to conserve. Thank you for your time and your work. Hello. I will be talking about how we can understand animal welfare challenges in research and education on wildlife, non-model species, and biodiversity, specifically wild animal populations, and how the emergence of a wildlife disease has led to the evolution of new biosecurity efforts in the field. This will be the first of two talks. The second talk by Dr. Vance Riedenberg will expand upon these comments. The numbers of wildlife pathogens and parasites are increasing every year, as are the frequency of those outbreaks. Yet most IOCUC policies and guidelines are not designed for use with wildlife and these pathogens. Yet research is necessary to understand these challenges of emerging infectious diseases. While doing so involves risk to researchers, study organisms, and their environments. We will need to develop new policies that can ensure human safety, support wildlife research, and reduce environmental health risks related to emerging infectious diseases. In my talk, I will first describe the amphibian-kittred-pathogen background and how it influences biosecurity protocols. Talk about the field biosecurity and safety precautions that have emerged from this new disease and its relevance for research and conservation. I will end with some brief recommendations for regulation and oversight. I'll be talking about two types of fungal pathogens. The first was described in 1997. We call it BD for betraco-ketrium dendrobatedis. This is a cartoon of the life cycle of BD. It alternates between an infection in the skin of amphibians that then releases sperm-like zoo spores that move about in wet or moist environments, meaning that any biosecurity protocol will need to focus on not only the animals involved but also the water, the soil, and other parts of the environment to reduce disease spread. Currently, this is the distribution of BD around the globe. The dots in orange represent animals that have been tested and found to be positive with this fungus, while areas that have yellow dots or are white without any dots at all represent areas that have been tested and found to either be not infected or have not even been tested, showing that this is going to require international cooperation in terms of establishing global biosecurity protocols to prevent the international spread of this disease to uninfected areas. The impact of BD so far has been horrific on the amphibian biodiversity of the world. At least 500 species are in decline because of this fungus, and this emphasizes the broad range that this fungus and many other diseases have, meaning that we cannot focus on just one or a few species, but we'll need to consider all amphibians as potential vectors or reservoirs of the disease. Over 90 species have already gone extinct because of this disease, and 39% of study populations are still in decline. And this reminds us that this fungus persists in the environment, even when amphibians are very rare, meaning that good biosecurity protocols are going to be necessary everywhere for the foreseeable future because it does persist in the environment. And there's been very little recovery, so this is going to be a long-term situation. We also know that BD, like COVID, comes in different genotypes or lineages or variants, and while here in North America we have the common global pandemic lineage, we can see that other flavors, the different colors on this map, are often restricted to one or two other continents, meaning again that global cooperation in terms of mitigating the spread globally will be important to keep variants out of places where they do not currently occur. This is a map showing the genetic evidence taken from sampling of animals in the pet trade that international trade contributes to the global spread of this and probably other wildlife diseases. The different colored arrows represent the movement of those different colored lineages among different continents, meaning that humans are one of the main factors causing the spread of this disease around the world. But once it has been introduced, this disease can spread on its own, apparently without human interference through the contact of frog to frog or frog to infected environment. This shows the episodic spread of BD through Costa Rica and Panama in the 1990s. It was introduced at some point through some unknown means in northern Costa Rica in the late 1980s and it's spread on its own through Costa Rica and Panama, meaning that we have to do everything we can to keep it out if we cannot eliminate it or stop its spread once it has been introduced. The second kitra that I will talk about is B. Sal, the trachocitrium salamander vorance or B. discovered in 2014. This cartoon shows its life cycle which is very similar to that of BD with the only difference being the addition of the insisted fungal spores. These floating sticky zoo spores can be moved about on the feet of ducks, on the boots of researchers, through water currents or through the spread of infected soil. And so we're going to need to pay extra attention to this fungus. Luckily B. Sal is restricted to two different parts of the world as of 2016. In yellow we see its distribution in Asia where it is thought to have originated. Unfortunately it has been introduced into parts of Europe where it is spreading, causing mortality and population declines in the native amphibians there. For those of us in North America this is especially concerning because North America is the world's global biodiversity hotspot for salamanders as shown in this map here. B. Sal is not here yet. We hope to keep it out but without good biosecurity it may be only a matter of time before an infected animal, soil, or water spreads it into North America. So we really do require really good field biosecurity and safety precautions for these and other wildlife diseases. You heard from Jonathan with the White-Know Syndrome in BATS about their office that coordinates these types of efforts. For the amphibians there is no research coordination, no official plan, no enforcement office. In the US or globally there have been efforts led by the USGS to develop emergency response and risk mitigation tools, including the development of a B. Sal task force ready to step into action. But it's mostly been the research community that has driven the development of biosecurity protocols and practices. They have shared this information internationally and with other stakeholder groups including industry pet stores and the zoos and aquaria of the world. Further scientific societies have endorsed and shared these resources by posting information on their websites. And there is a national disease task team here in the US. Some of the biosecurity protocols that field researchers use today include the decontamination of boots, clothing, equipment, and vehicles shown here in these images. And we can see that good cleaning of boots is going to reduce the spread of these pathogens as well as others into uninfected areas. There are also animal health precautions we will need to take as we do research on these emerging infectious diseases. Researchers will want to reduce the spread of disease among the animals that they handle. And we do this normally by changing gloves between handling every individual amphibian. Further, we want to make sure that when we do have to restrain animals or keep them housed in bags, buckets, or aquaria, that we do so in a way that keeps animals collected from different sites separate, that we keep individuals as separate as possible, and that different species are not combined either. Further, as much as possible, we do not want to return animals that have been kept in captivity back into the field in the chance that they may have picked up other diseases. Obviously, this will be an issue for conservation reintroductions or experiments, and Dr. Riedenberg will be expanding upon this in his talk. Here we have some pictures of field researchers in the field handling animals following biosecurity protocols. We see everybody handling animals are wearing gloves or using disposable plastic bags to keep them separate and not in contact with potentially infected surfaces. The bags and the gloves are then disposed of between every individual. There's been development of some rules of thumb for biosecurity when working with amphibian diseases, and these apply to many other wildlife diseases as well. We may D.D. Olson describe these rules of thumb sort of in two general categories. The standard biosecurity we would employ between sites, disinfect our gear, the equipment, the vehicles, the boots, but then there's enhanced biosecurity that we would want to employ for working on rare or endangered species or if we are able to work in areas that are pathogen free. In these cases, we still follow the standard biosecurity protocols, but in addition, we may decide to dedicate gear to a particular site. Our nets and boots, for example, may never leave that particular site. We may, when designing our sampling protocol, want to design it in a way where we begin working in the uninfected sites and only later do we move into the infected sites to prevent the spread into those pathogen free areas. Further, we may decide to start at the top of the mountain or in the headwater streams and then move down the mountain or into the lower reaches to, again, reduce the spread into those less, those more protected areas. Further, we want to consider how we might extend biosecurity to the public and to other field researchers. We want to be sure to share our practices as well as learn from practices that have been developed by the aquatic invasive and aquatic disease fields as well. It's not just amphibian researchers that may move disease from site to site, but public visitation to national and state parks or to researchers studying other organisms could also be vectors for disease spread. So, we always want to be careful that we are not going to transport it through our movement or the movement of wild animals, water, or soil between sites. And we especially want to make sure that we do not release captive, pet, or experimental animals that may have picked up diseases while in captivity. And there's, again, good work from the aquatic, pathogen, and invasive species organizations that we might be able to adopt and spread. Obviously, this has some implications for conservation and for research. The disease-driven population declines from kitred fungus have caused species extinctions and really increased the endangerment of many species. There's a trade-off between doing the research to address these problems and the fact that that research may reduce wild populations even further. So, there's a lot of ethical choices we should discuss related to study species choice and the numbers of individuals that may be available for research, which is currently already done in our IOCUC protocols. Further, we want to also discuss in detail the source of those experimental animals. Can we take them from the wild? Will we need to use captive populations or surplus animals from captive breeding or other sources? And a growing problem is being seen now where posting locality data for rare endangered valuable species is leading to illegal take and over-collecting of those already rare endangered species. So, in summary, there's a lot we can do to co-develop new policies with this broad stakeholder audience. Not only do we want to involve our University IOC, Environmental Health and Safety, and biosafety offices, but we probably also want to discuss this with our permitting agencies, both here in the U.S., internationally, and in our collaborating nations. Land managers, field station managers, have a lot of control over mitigating the spread of disease through communication and regulation. And our scientific societies have a role to play in endorsing and communicating these new protocols. We also need to recognize these trade-offs between research and conservation and the value added by being able to work in these new topics. We want to share our best practices and policies more broadly, including with non-target researchers and the public. And with that, I will end and take questions. Thank you. Hi, my name is Vance Friedenberg, and I'm talking today from San Francisco, California, where I'm a professor at San Francisco State University. I'm giving the second part talk that Dr. Lips started before me discussing and understanding animal welfare challenges in research and education in wildlife. So, I have the same problem statement that Dr. Lips did, which is that emerging infectious diseases are increasingly common in wildlife, and these outbreaks are occurring not only in the populations that I'll be speaking about today in amphibians, but in many different types of wildlife. Now, most accurate policy and guidelines are not necessarily designed with wildlife populations in mind, in particular regarding pathogens and parasites. And I think it's clear that we understand that research is clearly necessary for us to understand these challenges. But doing this kind of research, of course, involves a risk, not only to the researchers themselves, but also to the study organisms and the environments they live in. So, it's clear that we need to develop policies that ensure both human safety and at the same time support wildlife research, which is increasingly important in our world, in a biosphere that is increasingly threatened. So, today's talk outline is going to be one where I will give you some background on biodiversity conservation in my field. I'll talk about the same disease that Dr. Lips did, and we'll expand a little bit on that as well. And then I'll get to, so Dr. Lips talked about the first four points here, and I'm going to be talking about 0.5678, which is basically how biosecurity and precautions in the lab are really important, and why they're important. I'll be talking about experimental manipulations and field lab exchanges back and forth basically, and how we try, how we need to be flexible, but also safe, and also how we might be able to incorporate future technologies or new technologies in our hope to try to preserve biodiversity on earth. So, the study organisms that I work on are amphibians, and they occur globally, mostly with the highest diversity in the tropics, as you can see here from this global map, and as of February, there were over 8,400 species of described amphibians in the world. These are some of my favorites. The giant Chinese salamander that lives in China, and there's one in Japan as well. The wolverine frog that has these amazing sort of characters that are displayed during breeding season, the gastric brooding frog, and unfortunately, like many amphibians, the gastric brooding frog where the males, what's sorry, where the females actually swallowed fertilized eggs and then reared their young in their GI tracts, unfortunately, those are now extinct, they used to occur in Australia. And in fact, if you look at amphibians and compare them to the other vertebrates on earth, living vertebrates, they're in worse shape than everything else. Over 30% are threatened with extinction, and maybe about 41% of all known species are declining, at least in some of their populations. Now this is a bit dated, this is from 2007, 2008, but the trend unfortunately continues, and we think that the amphibians are really giving us a window, unfortunately, into what's happening in our globe in terms of potentially a mass extinction event, such as we had in the past, as you can see from this drawing, perhaps what we think might have been involved with the decline, the mass die-off that occurred when the dinosaurs died off. Now of course, the amphibians made it through that and other mass extinction events in the past, but today they're in much worse shape, and in fact, if you look at where amphibians and populations, amphibian populations are in trouble around the world, here you can see that it's not a localized effect, it's a global effect. There are populations and species of amphibians that are in trouble all over the planet. I'm going to give you an example from a study here in California in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which is one of the most protected areas in North America, where we have famous national parks like Yosemite and Sequoia Kings Canyon national parks, but they're surrounded by other national forest lands that are wilderness lands, which means that there are no roads, no buildings, and no extraction of resources within those areas, and yet we have a major problem with amphibians in those areas in the high elevation parts of the Sierra Nevada. There are numerous amphibian species listed here, and of those, the ones in red are the ones that are in trouble, and you can see that a majority of the species of amphibians, which includes salamanders, frogs, and toads, are in major, major trouble, despite the fact that their habitat is completely protected. And here you can see just the points from the yellow-legged frogs, which I'll be talking about later. All of those points in red are places where are actual sites where the species has gone locally extinct. This area is an amazing place to work, as you can see here. It's a beautiful, beautiful place that's wonderful to work in, and these frogs in particular are interesting because they are diurnal, they're easy to catch, they're easy to see, and unfortunately they're also part of the global problem in emerging infectious disease. This is a photograph that Joel Sartori took that came out in National Geographic in around 2009 or 10, showing the die-off in the study area where I had been working. The die-off was caused by a disease called caturidomycosis, which was described in 1999, caused by a pathogen called betraco-caturium dendro-potatas, BD, and I'll be telling you more about this as we go. It's a microscopic pathogen, fungal pathogen that infects the skin of the host, and it has this free-swimming zoo spore that then emerges from the host's skin cells, where the pathogen is growing, where the fungus is growing, and either reinfects the same host or infects a new host. And it can grow, because it grows asexually, it can grow incredibly fast and cause mass infections, as we discovered in the Sierra Nevada. So here's a population, a meta-population of frogs in King's Canyon that I studied, and we had, in this area, repeated visual counts, over 900 counts from 1996 through 2008. And during that time, we also had these skin swabs that we collected, which was, which allowed us to conduct pathogen assay analysis without harming individuals. We had over 6,000 of those skin swabs collected between 2004-2008. These were done on these two species, Rana muscosa, which is southern mountain yellow-legged frog, and Rana sierrae, the Sierra Nevada yellow-legged frog, which occur in these mountain ranges in the Sierra Nevada and around Southern California, around Los Angeles. And you can see here that they abut each other, and we have a healthy frog at the top and a very sick frog in the bottom. And now what I'm going to show you is what happened as the disease spread through this habitat. This is data from a place called Sixty Lake Basin in King's Canyon National Park, which has these lakes that you can see here in this map that drain to the north. And the lakes in green are ones that have frog populations, the biggest metapopulation of frogs for this species anywhere in the world. From 1996 to 2003, there was no record, we found no evidence of the pathogen, the fungal pathogen BD was there. And then in 2004, it showed up in these two populations here in yellow and then spread. And as the populations go from green to yellow, they go from uninfected to infected. And as they go from yellow to black, they go to population extinction at those sites. So 2004, here's a kilometer, so you can see how big this is. It started there, 2005, it had already spread across a large part of the basin uphill, which is interesting. By 2006 it had spread further, 2007, and by 2008 it had spread across the entire basin and wiped out the majority of the more than 10,000 adult frogs that occurred in that area. Unfortunately by 2010, we were down to just several dozen frogs that were left in the entire basin. So one of the biggest populations, metapopulations of frogs after this disease outbreaks ended up with very, very few individuals. They were eventually rescued by the San Francisco Zoo and that's their story that I'll tell later. Contrary to mycosis isn't just affecting frogs in California, it's affecting frogs as Dr. Lips told you in Central America, frogs and salamanders, as well as throughout the Andes in South America, parts of Africa, and Australia. And all of these points are shown in other places where BD infections have been found. And underneath here there's a red little circle in Europe and it says B cell and this is the second pathogen that causes caturidomycosis that was more recently discovered spread from Asia into Europe. We believe through the pet trade. So the global trade in live amphibians we think is involved with the spread of this pathogen. This just shows the main species that are bought and sold for people who like to have pets, amphibian pets, and then unfortunately those pets are many of them are released and when you release a pet like that into the wild you're not only releasing that individual but all of the flora and fauna that live on and within them. This is a very dangerous situation and for B cell in particular it has not been found in North America and we're very very worried about it because North America has more salamanders than anywhere else in the world so this is from paper we published in Science that showed that these are the areas of North America in red that are showing the highest vulnerability to potential vulnerability to this pathogen. Now this is based on modeling and B cell has not been found here yet but these numbers are cities where most of those live animals in trade are moved through trade. Now what can we do as scientists? Well we're very interested of course in understanding how these individual species react to these different pathogens in the lab and the lab is a great place to do that and we have to take very special and very important steps to make sure that we do not allow pathogens that are tested in the lab on individuals to get out into the wild. For example B cell has been tested in several labs in the United States and it's not been found in the wild so it's a very very important biosecurity issue. We have to be very precautious, we have to be very precautious and but at the same time we need to do some of these tests to figure out who is responsible or who is assistable to this pathogen. Symbiotic bacteria we discovered can help so that's so one thing is understanding who is going to be susceptible another is what can we do about it. So in a study we published a few years ago we found that some of the bacteria that live symbiotically on the skin of frogs protects them from the sphungus and here is a study once we figured out what those symbiotic bacteria were there's a lot of interest now in trying to figure out well can we bio augment those bacteria on amphibians to save them in the wild and so there's a lot of research to be done this is a frog sitting in a vat of symbiotic bacteria that is beneficial to the frogs. Now we know that this BD pathogen is a big deal over 500 species all over the world they've been infected by it. In fact I think it's closer to a thousand species now but we know that at least 200 species have been dramatically decreased by in the wild by episodics. So what can we do about it? Well for one we can describe what's going on in terms of the skin microbiome but then we can also identify those cultures that may work as tools to protect against infection. This is of course these things are all tied directly into research if we don't have the research we can't do anything about it in the wild. So there's a lot of interest now to use zoos and researchers to help for example reintroduce animals into the wild. So here's an example the San Francisco Zoo and the Oakland Zoo both have programs where they're working with these frogs here in California the two species of mountain allergic frogs to raise them in some cases inoculate them with the pathogen and then clean the infection off of them to give them a fighting chance and then re-release them in the wild. So this brings up a lot of issues of course we need to be able to do these experiments both in the lab and in the field but of course we need to be really careful about them. We need to be able to use as many tools as we can from they understand our understanding of population genetics to the microbes that live on symbiotically on these species to understanding how multiple pathogens can affect individuals both in the field but originally in the lab. So we can do things where we can perhaps add and remove disease or disease to animals at sites and this could of course affect disease dynamics. I mentioned before that we can inoculate them and then try to reintroduce them there are lots of different avenues that we can try but of course we need to keep in mind that adding healthy individuals could provide additional host resources that could then produce additional disease epidemics. We need to think really carefully and clearly about the what our research and conservation actions might mean when we're thinking about in this case number six here are four examples of different pathogens that have caused die-offs in amphibians and in this case snakes. So we've got BD and B-sal that cause catridiomycosis, ronavirus is a type of virus that has been shown to kill amphibians in the wild and then there's snake fungal disease which is another emerging pathogen that's been shown to be potentially very dangerous for snakes in North America. So zoo animals and captive populations are really an important part of that. This is a picture showing some from Panama where the amphibian arc group is trying to rear and then reintroduce some of these amphibians into the wild. And this area in red is when especially in the 90s is when researchers first notice the die-offs in those areas. So there's a lot of interest in trying to get these frogs reintroduced out into the wild and one of the most important groups is this group of frogs that are at the genus Adelopus. It's a type of toad actually. They're diurnal, they're very beautiful animals and there are over a hundred known species, 90 over 90 of which have gone either extinct or close to extinct since the B.D. episodics. So what will happen if we try to reintroduce some of them that we've saved in these zoos? Are we going to be able to do it? How do we do it? And what do we do about that? Now there are other ways that we can bring back species. So here's one example from the CRISPR world, the bioengineering world, where synthetic biology is coming together and trying... There's a lot of people interested in bringing back species that have been extinct, for example the woolly mammoths. That's been extinct thousands of years, but what about amphibians that have been extinct, maybe extinct in the wild, only over the last couple of decades? Can we bring them back? And what kind of issues does that bring up? So what do we recommend? Well like there are some successes out there already from synthetic biology, for example, for example with the black-footed ferith. We know that synthetic biology has helped increase genetic diversity of some of the surviving individuals and they've been able to... The US Fish and Wildlife Service has been able to do it. Do this kind of research by providing some sort of flexibility that allows them to explore these new conservation actions. And we are very interested in keeping an open mind and leaving that possibility open. We don't want to close down our options. We need to allow controlled exploratory science that could potentially assist species that are in trouble, because remember we're experiencing a global biodiversity emergency. So we need to do what we can to make that happen, but make it happen in a safe way. We can't just do nothing because of biosecurity concerns. Biosecurity concerns are absolutely important, but we need to think about when we can intervene and how we can intervene. We need to know... We need to make sure that we have the right groups involved in this conversation, the IACUC committees, scientists, land managers, how to bring all these people together. We also need to definitely start thinking about ethicists and how do we get ethics involved in this. So we have specific recommendations, which is that IACUC committees should support research in the field and not impede that research. We need to make sure that people are safe, obviously, where people understand the dangers to other people and to themselves, to take precautions and to have a plan for if something goes wrong. We need to make sure that the organisms are safe and they're not impacted significantly, either by collections from populations or by unintended consequences, such as what I mentioned with pet trade. What do we hope to achieve? Well, we hope to achieve eventually a situation where we can have both these issues that I talked about in terms of who is safe and how we're safe. But we also need to think carefully about the ethical considerations. We need to think about how we can share information and communicate that information with other people to make sure that we're making the best decisions we possibly can. And with that, I want to just open it up for questions. And I want to thank the organizers of the workshop and I want to thank these different funding agencies that have helped fund my work. Thank you very much. Hello, my name is John Brian and I work as a freelance wildlife veterinarian. Along the way, I've had the opportunity to gain experience in the realm of wildlife animal welfare, working with numerous academic, federal, state, and private sector agencies and entities. I've also had the privilege of serving on many IACOs, for example, as chair, voting member, and or as an attending veterinarian. This is work I consider to be profoundly important and I'm deeply grateful to be able to continue to contribute to the field, no pun intended. These are the general topics we'll cover today. The previous presenters did a wonderful job sharing their examples and experiences of risk management and biosecurity issues that really must be considered by compliance and oversight bodies when assessing wildlife animal use activities. This presentation aims to back things up a bit and glean some vantage from the 36,000-foot perspective, so to speak. And while the true size and complexity of this topic far exceeds the size and scope of this presentation, we'll nevertheless attempt to touch on its higher strata concepts. In other words, the big picture. Our focal points will be risk management obligations of animal welfare oversight bodies, inherent risks of conducting animal use activities involving wildlife in their natural habitats on a macro scale, and then inherent risks of conducting animal use activities involving wildlife in their natural habitats on a micro scale. And then finally we'll talk about a path forward, how oversight bodies, basically IACOX, can achieve competence in the area of risk management and biosafety concerning wildlife animal use activities. Let's begin with risk management obligations of animal welfare oversight bodies, and let's start with the Animal Welfare Act and Regulations, which basically states that IACOX aren't really mandated to oversee occupational health programs. However, the guide is a little bit different stating that IACOX are mandated to oversee occupational health programs. However, both have a duty to assess wildlife animal use protocols with due diligence toward risk mitigation and biosafety for humans, target and non-target species, and environment and habitat. The take-home point here really is that splitting hairs between the disparate occupational health oversight mandates of the AWAR and the guide kind of misses the point. Any oversight body, whether USDA registered, O-Law registered, or both, must consider in its assessments and deliberations all factors affecting the welfare of the animals under study. And in the arena of wildlife oversight, there is little to no difference in the application of these standards between study species, humans, and the environment in which the activity takes place. An IACOX conducting an appropriately informed review of any wildlife animal use activity will inevitably reach the point where the lines between what is best for humans, the wildlife species under study, and the environment hosting the activity not only become indistinguishable, but are inherently interdependent. Oversight of wildlife animal use activities demands, on the part of any IACOX, a due diligence effort toward recognizing, understanding, and applying appropriate risk mitigation standards, standards that by nature respect the innate interplay and interdependence of researchers, wildlife species, and the host environment. In wildlife oversight, there is simply no room for compartmentalizing. And now we move on to the inherent risks of conducting animal use activities involving wildlife and their natural habitats on a macro scale. This list of risks represent the larger, broader scale set of risks and concerns when conducting wildlife animal use projects in the field. And as an aside, please note that I'm deliberately not going to use the term field study in this presentation. The reason being that this term has distinct definitions from the AWAR and the guide. For example, the Animal Welfare Act and regulations defines a field study specifically as a wildlife animal use project that has been deemed exempt from review and approval by an IACOX. Moreover, since the AWAR and regulations is federal law, this is a legal definition and this is not the case in the guide. The guide employs a more liberal interpretation of the term field study basically to describe any kind of wildlife animal use in the field. Okay, moving back to subject. In other words, these are risk factors that any IACOX should, and I'll go so far as to say, shall investigate and weigh and instill deliberations of a wildlife animal use protocol. Let's go through them briefly to get the idea. Climate, where is the activity taking place? Is it desert, alpine, aquatic, urban, tundra, mountainous? Is the protocol appropriately designed and conceived to succeed safely considering not just the human team, but the target species, etc? Landscape, what is the terrain like? For example, is it rocky, dangerous, and difficult to navigate? Perhaps when one might be studying mountain goats? What are the risk factors of capturing the target animal on this landscape? For example, is there a risk to the animal perhaps falling when working with mountain goats? Or perhaps floor to panthers that have been chemically immobilized running off and perhaps drowning in shallow water? Seasonality, in what season is the activity taking place? The image above provides an example of the need to respect the seasonality of a project. For example, rainy season versus dry season. One needs to be prepared. Target species, seasonality, again. This time though, the focus is on the particular physiology of the animals under study. For example, welping season for wolves, hibernation for bears, etc., and other species. Human risks as well, for example, frostbite, overheating. Terrain, to capture and handling protocols account for potential risks and difficulties of the terrain, similar to the above. Non-target species, when conducting wildlife animal use activities in the field, no species exists in a vacuum. One must always keep in mind that you're working with an interdependent web of a habitat and for any impacts your protocol may have on the target species, there will be varying degrees of collateral impacts on the immediate environment. Does the AUP address these issues? Equipment. How does an AUP address the potential impacts of equipment? For example, the risks of lead rounds, sodium pentobarbital, and or drug-filled mist and stray darts, etc., vehicles, for example, spotter aircraft, helicopters, trucks, etc. The point is to keep these risk factors in mind for humans, target species, and the environment. Now let's take it down somewhat in scale to smaller, more specific risks and biosafety concerns. Again, previous presenters did an outstanding job discussing several of these. However, we're going to touch on some of the general categories of concern. Disease is always paramount, as a great deal of wildlife animal use activities are indeed focused on disease, whether it be at the species level, genus level, or class level, etc., specific to those taxonomic specifications, or a zoonotic agent. The risk of an activity exacerbating or facilitating disease transmission via capture and handling, etc., must be weighed by any eye-cook. Trauma. Trauma via pursuit, capture, handling, recovery, etc., and unintended consequences, for example, predation following extended recovery. Euthanasia and carcass disposition. A bit of a roll over from the previous slide, yet relevant on any scale. Euthanasia often concerns risk with firearms and drugs, and leaving a carcass in the field following euthanasia by either lead rounds from a firearm or sodium pentobarbital is unacceptable. Actions such as these have direct deleterious effects on secondary, tertiary scavengers, and to a degree, the landscape as well in the case of lead grounds. Chemical exposure. Having the right drugs for the job is imperative. However, this means nothing without accompanying due diligence drug use protocols that address pharmacology issues in the context of overdose, non-target accidental exposure, specifically to humans, and redress how to deal with these issues as they arise. Seasonality also comes into play here as the risks change. For example, the same drug in winter may require somewhat different use protocols if used in summer. Allergies, toxicology risks. Remember, the take-home message here is to think of all of these in terms of humans, species, and the environment. Individual animals are certainly capable of having adverse reactions to certain drugs. Moreover, landscape risks including exposure to poisonous or venomous species, for example, animal, plant, fungal, etc., etc. Any wildlife AUP must account for such risks, and the reviewing eye-cook must likewise inquire as to the AUP's ability to address such issues. Now let's move to a path forward. These are only a few of the tools that can and really should be employed by animal welfare oversight bodies to achieve an appropriate, and I mean high, level of competence and confidence reviewing and assessing wildlife animal use activities. But these are the big ones, and we're going to go a little bit into each. Committee composition, having wildlife animal use activities on the docket can be daunting for an eye-cook that doesn't see these kinds of things very often. Moreover, if the reviewing committee lacks any real expertise in wildlife, then the process risks becoming burdensome, confusing, delayed, and perhaps even insufficiently reviewed, for all involved. The solution here is rather simple. Find wildlife experts and put them on the committee. If any eye-cook knows it will occasionally see wildlife AUPs, it would do well to populate the committee with at least one or two wildlife professionals, for example biologists, wildlife veterinarians, etc. This will go a long way toward boosting the committee's confidence and ability in appropriately reviewing such activities. Consultation, even if the committee has at least one wildlife member, it's never a bad idea to seek additional insight on wildlife animal use activity reviews from expert consultants. And while such folks don't hold voting privileges, they can contribute profoundly to an eye-cook's ability to make an appropriate informed review. And this includes the PI. Researchers themselves can be extremely helpful in explaining their work, especially in terms of the aforementioned risks from slides three, four, and five. Wildlife specific submission forms. Many standard AUP submission forms are biometically centric and lack the suite of appropriate questions concerning wildlife animal use activities. This often results in incomplete assessments, frustration on the parts of both the PI and the committee, and prolonged delays. And in the context of this talk, this unfortunate process has the potential to miss most of, if not all, potential risks and biosafety issues inherent to a given wildlife animal use activity. Examples of such forms exist and can be found in use by many state and federal eye-cooks that frequently deal with wildlife animal use activities. Collaboration and CE. This is simple. Both the animal welfare act regulations and the guide require training for animal welfare oversight bodies. There are many opportunities for training and continued education on issues specific to wildlife animal use activities, especially in the areas of risk management and biosecurity and safety. This is really the take-home. In principle, the concept is simple. Wildlife animal use activities have dynamic, complex risks. They can be very dangerous endeavors, regardless of locale or species. Oversight of such projects requires the development of commensurately in-depth informed strategy to mitigate biosafety risks to all involved. Anything less is an inadequate effort and may result in tremendous harm to humans, animals, or the environment.