Global change is an important driver of the increase in emerging infectious diseases in recent decades. In parallel, interest in nature has increased, and different citizen science platforms have been developed to record wildlife observations from the general public. Some of these platforms also allow registering the observations of dead or sick birds. Here, we test the utility of live, sick and dead observations of birds recorded on the platform Observation.org for the early detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV) outbreaks in the wild in Belgium and The Netherlands. There were no significant differences in the morbidity/mortality rate through Observation.org one to four weeks in advance. However, the results show that the HPAIV outbreaks officially reported by the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) overlapped in time with sudden increases in the records of sick and dead birds in the wild. In addition, in two of the five main HPAIV outbreaks recorded between 2016 and 2021, wild Anseriformes mortality increased one to two months before outbreak declaration. Although we cannot exclude that this increase was related to other causes such as other infectious diseases, we propose that Observation.org is a useful nature platform to complement animal health surveillance in wild birds. We propose possible approaches to improve the utility of the platform for pathogen surveillance in wildlife and discuss the potential for HPAIV outbreak detection systems based on citizen science to complement current surveillance programs of health authorities.
Keywords: avian influenza virus; citizen science platforms; early warning system; outbreak surveillance.