Our History

Our founders, Rachel Avilla and Devin Dombrowski, have been wildlife rehabilitators since 2003. They saw a need for a wildlife database that was simple for everyone to use but scalable to large facilities. Devin is a self taught programmer and set out to create the Wildlife Rehablitation Medical Database, commonly referred to as WRMD. Development of WRMD begain in 2010 and beta testing took place in 2012. WRMD was officially launched in 2013 and The Wild Neighbors Database Project was incorporated as a nonprofit in order to support WRMD and our other projects. Check out WRMD’s first Kickstarter campaign from 2013!

Flash forward to today and WRMD is used all over the world. As of 2024, WRMD is used in all 50 states, 34 countries, has over 1,600 accounts and over 3.6 million wild patients entered. We continue to play an active role in WRMD by providing ongoing user support and continuing to improve WRMD behind the scenes with updated features and new versions.

Along the way, Rachel and Devin were asked to develop additional projects that are now supported through The Wild Neighbors Databse Project. These projects are O-WRMD (O for oiled), which is an oil spill database created for UC Davis. WildAlert, an early alert system for wildlife health events that is currently being used in California, Arizona and Florida with the potential of coming to other states in the future. Their newest project is Ceto, which is an online database for marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Wild Neighbors Database Project aims to develop software systems that help people to save more wild lives through data. We look forward to additional exciting projects on the horizon.

See the video below for the story of how our Co-Founders, Rachel Avilla and Devin Dombrowski, met and decided to create WRMD.