Dear SMART Community!!
We need your help to better understand:
i) the current status of data collection in protected areas regarding sick, injured, or dead wildlife,
ii) the type of information collected in protected areas with respect to these animals,
iii) the perceptions of wildlife and livestock health within protected areas, and
iv) the use of the SMART tools (SMART Connect, SMART upgrades, etc.) in protected areas.
We are very interested in expanding the use of SMART to record and manage data from wildlife health events identified or observed during patrols. For this reason, if you are a SMART Desktop user that administers patrol data, we invite you to participate in a voluntary electronic survey on the topics outlined above. The information collected through this survey will be extremely useful to understand the scale of the opportunity that protected area patrolling and SMART represents in terms of wildlife health monitoring across the globe and the interest of SMART users to improve/expand in this area.
The current survey has been prepared by the Wildlife Conservation Society - Health Program and Conservation Technology departments. The principal investigators are Dr. Diego Montecino-Latorre (dmontecino@wcs.org), Dr. Sarah Olson, and Jonathan Palmer.
The survey has been approved by the SMART Partnership and it does not collect any personal information. Further, the survey is configured so the platform hosting it (Google Forms) will not provide respondents’ IP addresses as part of the collected data.
The survey will request the name(s) of the protected area(s) to facilitate analysis (i.e., aggregate findings by country or region, address duplication issues when there are two or more sets of responses from the same site); however, protected area-level information will not be publicly shared in any data products.
The survey will remain open for answers between October 27th, 2022 - November 17th, 2022. A report will be created to communicate the findings of the survey and it will be provided to Monica Harris, SMART Program Manager, to distribute it back to the SMART Partnership.
The welcome page of the survey and the survey itself can be translated into any language. Please read the instructions on the welcome page to translate the survey.
Beforehand, the principal investigators appreciate your willingness and time spend to answer this survey. It is estimated that it will take 12 minutes to complete.
The link to reach the questionnaire is Home
Many thanks,