Midwest Fish & Wildlife Conference 2018

AUTHORS. Michael Foy, Retired

ABSTRACT. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is thought to be a slowly progressing but universally fatal disease of cervids, a wildlife resource likely worth billions of dollars to the midwestern U.S. and Canadian economy annually.  CWD is proving to be a serious challenge to application of traditional wildlife management and human dimensions techniques, with very few examples of successful and sustained CWD management as measured by disease frequency, prevalence and distribution stabilization or reduction.  With disease prevalence now exceeding 30-50% within some cohorts of local populations of white-tailed deer, CWD may prove to be an existential threat to continued recreational use of this popular midwest wildlife resource in the coming century, if not threatening cervid populations directly.This presentation proposes modeling disease prevalence distributions to geographically locate concentrations of CWD-infected cervids, and to reward citizens, hunters, landowners, and small businesses that report, harvest, sample, test and provide access to CWD positive animals.  The goal is to encourage societal collaboration and participation to produce negative disease growth while maintaining positive cervid population growth, and thus manage CWD through long-term attrition until vaccines or other solutions are developed.  Techniques to encourage participation, evaluate disease dynamics, and discourage fraud are discussed.