USDA APHIS Wildlife Services has established a National Wildlife Disease Surveillance and Emergency Response System (SERS). The goal of SERS is to develop and implement a nationally coordinated disease monitoring system aimed at safeguarding wildlife populations, agriculture, and human health and safety from disease threats. The SERS is designed to provide an infrastructure capable of assisting state, federal, and tribal agencies with both routine disease monitoring and in addressing wildlife disease threats. Supplementing existing programs with a nationally coordinated wildlife surveillance system facilitates information exchange among the programs, ensures diseases of national bio-security concern (e.g., plague, tularemia, avian influenza, classical swine fever) are adequately sampled, and additionally, provides field and laboratory infrastructure which is available to assist other agencies with sampling collection and disease diagnosis during emergency outbreaks. The SERS currently consists of national program staff and 23 wildlife disease biologists distributed throughout the country. During 2005, these biologists provided disease surveillance assistance to 17 states for chronic wasting disease, 19 states for West Nile virus, 18 states for rabies, and numerous other states for surveillance of 18 other diseases. In 2005, the SERS program coordinated national level surveillance systems for plague and tularemia (18 states) and for diseases in feral swine (14 states). Currently, SERS is coordinating a National Early Detection System for Asian influenza H5N1 in migratory birds, in collaboration with other federal and state partners.

In January 2000, the Nevada Board of Wildlife Commissioners (Wildlife Commissioners) directed Nevada’s state game management agency, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW), to secure wildlife damage management (WDM) assistance from the United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Wildlife Services Program (WS) for the purpose of protecting a struggling population of pronghorn antelope located in northern Washoe County, Nevada. NDOW had documented, over a several-year period, that this northern Nevada antelope population had consistently demonstrated unacceptably low fawn recruitment levels. While NDOW was unsure of the cause for this consistent poor production record, the Wildlife Commissioners suspected “excessive” fawn predation to be one of the primary causes for the unacceptable recruitment levels. WS was contracted by NDOW to initiate fawn protection efforts for this population with an emphasis on coyote predation management. In collaboration with WS, NDOW mapped out a designated protection area where WDM activities would be conducted, established that WDM activities would only be conducted during the vulnerable fawning period, and set a target recruitment level for the herd which, when reached, would conclude the WDM activities. Prior to the initiation of WDM actions, WS personnel conducted several predator surveys to establish the coyote incidence level within the designated protection area. These data were to serve as a baseline indicator to help gauge the effectiveness of ongoing coyote removal efforts. While WS removed any coyote encountered within the specified protection area during the critical fawning season, removal efforts were primarily directed at older, territorial coyotes. The doe-to-fawn ratio was determined by NDOW at the end of each season, and when the ratio reached NDOW’s predetermined level of 32 fawns per 100 does, WDM activities were terminated. Additional benefits stemming from the antelope project included reduced predator pressure on other game species inhabiting the same area (such as mule deer), and collection of coyote blood samples for the monitoring of wildlife diseases such as plague.