The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on wildlife-aircraft collisions at US airports.

Exploiting unprecedented reductions in aircraft movements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated the relationship between air traffic volume and the frequency of wildlife-aircraft collisions, or wildlife strikes, at the 50 largest airports in the United States. During the COVID-19 months of 2020 (March-December), both air traffic volume and the absolute number of wildlife strikes were reduced. The net effect of these two movements, however, was an increase in the wildlife strike rate from May 2020-September 2020. This increase was found to be most pronounced at airports with larger relative declines in air traffic volume. We concluded that the observed increase in the wildlife strike rate was, at least in part, generated by risk-enhancing changes in wildlife abundance and behavior within the airport environment. That is, wildlife became more abundant and active at airports in response to declines in air traffic volume.

Risks of introduction and economic consequences associated with African swine fever, classical swine fever and foot-and-mouth disease: A review of the literature.

African swine fever (ASF), classical swine fever (CSF) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) are considered to be three of the most detrimental animal diseases and are currently foreign to the U.S. Emerging and re-emerging pathogens can have tremendous impacts in terms of livestock morbidity and mortality events, production losses, forced trade restrictions, and costs associated with treatment and control. The United States is the world's top producer of beef for domestic and export use and the world's third-largest producer and consumer of pork and pork products; it has also recently been either the world's largest or second largest exporter of pork and pork products. Understanding the routes of introduction into the United States and the potential economic impact of each pathogen are crucial to (a) allocate resources to prevent routes of introduction that are believed to be more probable, (b) evaluate cost and efficacy of control methods and (c) ensure that protections are enacted to minimize impact to the most vulnerable industries. With two scoping literature reviews, pulled from global data, this study assesses the risk posed by each disease in the event of a viral introduction into the United States and illustrates what is known about the economic costs and losses associated with an outbreak.

Estimation of wildlife damage from federal crop insurance data.

BACKGROUND: Wildlife damage to crops is a persistent and costly problem for many farmers in the USA. Most existing estimates of crop damage have relied on direct assessment methods such as field studies conducted by trained biologists or surveys distributed to farmers. In this paper, we describe a new method of estimating wildlife damage that exploits federal crop insurance data. We focused our study on four crops: corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton, chosen because of their economic importance and their vulnerability to wildlife damage. RESULTS: We determined crop-raiding hot spots across the USA over the 2015-2019 period and identified the eastern and southern regions of the USA as being the most susceptible to wildlife damage. We estimated lower bounds for dollar and percent losses attributable to wildlife to these four crops. The combined loss across four crops was estimated at $592.6 million. The highest total estimated losses to wildlife were incurred by soybeans ($323.9 million) and corn ($194.0 million) and the highest percentage losses were estimated for soybeans (0.87%) and cotton (0.72%). CONCLUSION: We believe the proposed method is a reliable way to evaluate geographic and temporal heterogeneity in damages for the coming years. Accurate information on damages benefits various management agencies by allowing them to allocate management resources to crops and regions where the problem is relatively severe. A better understanding of damage heterogeneity can also help guide research and development of new management techniques.