Report of the ENETWILD workshop
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Abstract
The ENETWILD consortium implementedtheEFSA‐funded project “Wildlife: collecting and sharing data on wildlife populations, transmitting animal diseases agents”, whose main objective is to collect wild boardensity, hunting and occurrence dataand model species geographical distribution and abundance throughout Europe.This subject is of particular concern due to the vastspread of African swine fever (ASF). In September 2019,the ENETWILD consortiumorganised aworkshop in Croatia for 27game biologists, animal health professionals, and experts from national huntingand forest authorities from 14 countriesfrom South East Europe.The overall objectives of the workshop were to present milestones and achievements of the ENETWILD project,to reviewthe framework forwild boar data collection and harmonization (hunting, density and occurrence data) of thedifferent countries,as well as to review scientificmethods for determiningwild boar abundance and density, and to train oncamera trapping and the random encounter method (REM).It was agreed thathunting bag data are currently the main source of information, although not always collected within a harmonized framework and rarely accompanied by a record of the hunting effort. Instead, wild boar abundance and densityestimates available in SouthEast Europe are unreliable because most of them are not based on scientific methods. Hence, there is a need to implement a novel method for determining wild boar abundance and densitythat uses hunting bag statistics including measures of hunting effort and efficiency during collective drive hunts, compared against density values calculated using camera trapping and the random encounter method (REM). Several collaborators have declared their willingness to participate in such pilot studies, and all agreed in improving data collection, including by means of citizen science.