Monitoring disease in Dutch wildlife rehabilitation centres: quality and usefulness of data

Monitoring wildlife health could help improve early detection of (zoonotic) wildlife diseases and evaluate the overall health status of wildlife populations. An important but currently untapped data source for this kind of monitoring purpose is wildlife rehabilitation centres. However, the quality of these data and the relative importance of associated biases have currently not been assessed. This PhD project aims to assess how different sources of bias affect the quality (i.e., validity and reliability) of the data collected by wildlife rehabilitation centres and find ways to use these data for improved surveillance of zoonoses and for ecological research. .