title: WILDLIFE HEALTH 2.0: BRIDGING THE KNOWLEDGE-TO-ACTION GAP.
abstract: The unprecedented threats to the health and sustainability of wildlife populations are inspiring conversations on the need to change the way knowledge is generated, valued, and used to promote action to protect wildlife health. Wildlife Health 2.0 symbolizes the need to investigate how to improve connections between research expertise and policy or practices to protect wildlife health. Two imperatives drive this evolution: 1) growing frustrations that research is inadequately being used to inform management decisions and 2) the realization that scientific certainty is context specific for complex socioecologic issues, such as wildlife health. Failure to appreciate the unpredictability of complex systems or to incorporate ethical and cultural dimensions of decisions has limited the contribution of research to decision making. Wildlife health can draw from scholarship in other fields, such as public health and conservation, to bridge the knowledge-to-action gap. Efforts to integrate science into decisions are more likely to be effective when they enhance relevance, credibility, and legitimacy of information for people who will make or be affected by management decisions. A Wildlife Health 2.0 agenda is not a rejection of the current research paradigm but rather a call to expand our areas of inquiry to ensure that the additional contextual understanding is generated to help decision makers make good choices.
authors.affiliation: 1   Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative, University of Saskatchewan, 52 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5B4, Canada.
authors.forename: Craig
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stephen
mesh_terms: D000820:Animal Diseases; D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild; D003142:Communication; D012106:Research
keywords: Decision; health; knowledge mobilization; research; wildlife