U.S. Geological Survey science strategy to address chronic wasting disease and cervid health in 2024–2028
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), a neurological disease similar to scrapie in goats and sheep, has been spreading since the 1960s throughout cervid populations in the United States.It is currently detected in 30 States and now also extends to Canada, Korea, and Scandinavia.CWD is a fatal disease caused by an infectious abnormally folded prion protein.Population-level effects of CWD on localized subpopulations of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and elk (Cervus elaphus) have been documented.While susceptible to CWD, free-ranging moose (Alces alces) and reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) populations do not currently appear to be as severely affected.The mission of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Chronic Wasting Disease and Cervid Health Science Team is to deliver integrated science to build resiliency into free-ranging cervid populations through more effective management of CWD, build capacity for ungulate health science, and enhance cervid health information sharing across USGS science centers and cooperative research units as well as with stakeholders.The USGS can play an important role in supporting regional and (or) national capacity building by providing resources and guidance to local, State, and Tribal management entities and by providing tools to enhance disease management.The USGS Ecosystems Mission Area's Biological Threats and Invasive Species Research Program (BTRP) is the lead Federal program for free-ranging wildlife disease research and surveillance.The BTRP is relied upon by Congress, as well as local, State, and Tribal partners, to provide quality science that allows for informed decisions to be made about wildlife disease policy, planning, and management.The information provided by our research gives policy makers and the public the understanding needed to improve management preparedness and response.This document describes the U.S. Geological Survey Science Strategy To Address Chronic Wasting Disease and Cervid Health.It lays out a 5-year science strategy (2024)(2025)(2026)(2027)(2028) for continued USGS research to study CWD in free-ranging cervids and their environments.The strategy includes improving detection methods, advancing our understanding of the mechanisms of transmission, incorporating the human dimensions and socio-economic effects of CWD in scientific studies, developing tools for decision making, and understanding potential effects of this disease on ecosystem health.Station where hunters can drop off samples to be tested for the presence of chronic wasting disease (CWD).Photograph by Jeff Corbett, U.S.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".