Data from: Data-driven management — A dynamic occupancy approach to enhanced rabies surveillance prioritization

Rabies lyssavirus (RABV) is enzootic in raccoons across the eastern United States. Intensive management of RABV by oral rabies vaccination (ORV) has prevented its spread westward and shown evidence of local elimination in raccoon populations of the northeastern United States. The USDA, Wildlife Services, National Rabies Management Program (NRMP) collaborates with other agencies to implement broad-scale ORV and conducts extensive monitoring to measure the effectiveness of the management. Enhanced Rabies Surveillance (ERS) was initiated during 2005 and updated in 2016 to direct surveillance efforts toward higher-value specimens by assigning points to different methods of encountering specimens for collection (strange-acting, roadkill, surveillance-trapped, etc.; specimen point values ranged from 1 to 15). The data provided are ERS data from 2016–2019 spanning from Alabama to Maine. The eastern U.S. was split into two regions: the northeastern U.S. (New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) and the lower eastern U.S. (Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia). Only the counties within the ERS area were included from each state. The two regions were overlayed with a 10 by 10 kilometer grid. The data include the region, grid ID, season, year, surveillance category, state, county, and the number of positive rabies samples as well as the number of total surveillance samples collected.
These data were collected as part of the Enhanced Rabies Surveillance program to monitor for the raccoon variant of the rabies virus along the eastern United States.
For more information about this study and these data, see Davis et al. (2021). Original publication date was 09/08/2021. Metadata updated on 10/14/2021 to include citation information for related journal article.