The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) fish health centers have launched a new tool to help in the fight to protect wild fisheries and to provide useful information to the aquaculture industry. The Wild Fish Health Survey Mapper provides near real-time surveillance of pathogens in wild aquatic animal populations.
For most of the 20th century, very little was known about the presence or distribution of naturally occurring viruses and pathogens that cause diseases in wild fish. That lack of knowledge put conservation efforts at risk because natural resource managers often have to move fish and other aquatic animals between hatcheries and ecosystems in order to support Tribal and recreational fisheries and conserve some of the most imperiled organisms in the world.
Since 1997 the FWS fish health centers, through opportunistic sampling in partnership with States and Tribes, have conducted a National Wild Fish Health Survey (NWFHS) to improve our ability to conserve fish and waterways. The survey provides information on the presence or absence of aquatic animal pathogens in wild fish populations to Tribes, State and Federal fisheries managers, the aquaculture industry, conservation groups, researchers, and the public.
In 2022, the NWFHS database was upgraded and fully integrated within a FWS-supported GIS-based system. The newly developed, searchable GIS mapper provides novel access to NWFHS data, which is the most robust data set of this type, containing over 200,000 tabular records from 1500 cases and covering nearly 1400 watersheds throughout the United States from 1997 to the present.
If used properly and within the limitations of the dataset, this data can help:
TheMapper and the NWFHS dataset can be found at: https://fws.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=db2d6619d8a14c1dab4ec9fd00dc9cfa