Wildlife Health and Medicine: Ecosystem-Based Approaches to Diagnosis, Treatment and Preventative Care

Dear Colleagues,

Wild animal populations are increasingly present in human life compared to in recent decades. While many regions of the world still face serious threats to wildlife due to their overexploitation, hunting pressure, deforestation, or anthropogenic habitat destruction, a contrasting trend has emerged in many countries across the Western world. Since the 1960s, large-scale rural depopulation has led to ecological consequences and conservation implications, including bush and tree encroachment on abandoned cropland and the expansion of formerly persecuted large mammalian ungulates and carnivores. This has created a completely new human–wildlife interface, even in urban environments, which is developing against the background of increased sensitivity to wildlife conservation and welfare. In this context, climate change and the role of vectors further complicate the landscape, contributing to the emergence and reappearance of infectious threats that demand urgent attention.

As conservation medicine suggests, these dynamics of remarkable ecological change require a radical shift in the approach to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases, both at the population and individual levels.

This Special Issue will consider original articles, case reports, and reviews in the field of integrated wildlife monitoring, as a discipline combining infection dynamics and the ecology of wildlife populations. It will also highlight the functional connection between health data and animal ecology information, including such topics as resource use, social structure, home range, dispersal, and population dynamics. We also welcome studies and case reports on captured individuals or rescued animals and data from wildlife rehabilitation centers, which admit and treat injured and sick wildlife, to understand patterns and impacts of wildlife disease and address the definition of threats to the wildlife–human interface.

Dr. Simone Angelucci
Prof. Dr. Cristina Esmeralda Di Francesco
Dr. Camilla Smoglica
Dr. Jorge Ramón López-Olvera
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.