Agricultural and Ecological Resources Safeguarded by the Prevention of Wild Pig Population Expansion.

Wild pigs () are one of the most destructive invasive species in the US, known for causing extensive damage to agricultural commodities, natural resources, and property, and for transmitting diseases to livestock. Following the establishment of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program (NFSDMP) in 2014, the expansion of wild pig populations has been successfully slowed. This paper combines two modeling approaches across eight separate models to characterize the expansion of wild pig populations in the absence of intervention by the NFSDMP and forecasts the value of a subset of resources safeguarded from the threat of wild pigs.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on wildlife-aircraft collisions at US airports.

Exploiting unprecedented reductions in aircraft movements caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we investigated the relationship between air traffic volume and the frequency of wildlife-aircraft collisions, or wildlife strikes, at the 50 largest airports in the United States. During the COVID-19 months of 2020 (March-December), both air traffic volume and the absolute number of wildlife strikes were reduced. The net effect of these two movements, however, was an increase in the wildlife strike rate from May 2020-September 2020.

Estimation of wildlife damage from federal crop insurance data.

Background: Wildlife damage to crops is a persistent and costly problem for many farmers in the USA. Most existing estimates of crop damage have relied on direct assessment methods such as field studies conducted by trained biologists or surveys distributed to farmers. In this paper, we describe a new method of estimating wildlife damage that exploits federal crop insurance data.