To Our WRMD Community

Dear WRMD Community,

We will just come out and say it, during this Season of Giving we are asking for your financial support.

Back in 2012 we started The Wild Neighbors Database Project, our 501(c)3 non-profit and launched WRMD as a labor of love. We developed WRMD for the community we love and for our wild neighbors. When we started we had no idea how quickly this program would spread, nor could we have ever imagined that WRMD would be used around the world by over 950+ organizations. We have seen it connect, reshape and modernize the wildlife rehabilitation profession.

The most important thing that WRMD has taught us in the past nine years is that wildlife rehabilitators knowledge, experience data is an invaluable resource for understanding the threats to our environment and collective health. Wildlife health events are the “canary in the coal mine” for our planet, which makes wildlife professionals first responders for many emerging infectious diseases that not only impact wildlife, but also all lives on this planet. This puts WRMD in a unique position to represent wildlife rehabilitators as key contributors to the One Health knowledge base.

We are asking for support from you, our WRMD community. WRMD is, and has always been, free. This is critical for wildlife rehabilitators that could not afford it otherwise. However, if you can afford any amount on a yearly or monthly basis, please consider adding WRMD to your budget. Software comparable to WRMD ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars a year. We continue to make improvements and updates within WRMD as well as keep up with new emerging technologies. This requires constant development, monitoring and surveillance of the WRMD program. We also maintain a very active forum where we answer questions and help with problems nearly every day of the year. We do all of this free of charge. Please consider helping us so we can continue to help you and our wild neighbors.

Here are a few of things we have been up to in 2021, all of which are truly remarkable milestones:

• The 2,000,000th patient was admitted to the WRMD database! It was a Northern Mockingbird from Davis, California in the US.
• Through a generous sponsorship we are now able to provide all WRMD users free access to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology – Birds of the World.
• We were published in our first research paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B - “Early detection of wildlife morbidity and mortality through an event-based surveillance system”
• With the release of the Wildlife Morbidity and Mortality Event Alert System in California, our partners the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the UC Davis, One Health Institute are now monitoring wildlife health events within California, with plans to expand this ability for other states and countries.
• We unveiled a brand new Knowledge Base to help our users find answers and solve problems on their own.

Can you help us? Please consider making a yearly or monthly donation to The Wild Neighbors Database Project to help support WRMD.

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With much love and gratitude,

Founders,
Devin Dombrowski and Rachel Avilla and the rest of the WRMD team