Florida Museum of Natural History
Key points
- State and local officials in Florida maintain hundreds coops with what are referred to as sentinel chickens, which act as an early alarm system for the presence of mosquito-borne illnesses in an area. This alarm system just got an upgrade.
- An interdisciplinary team of experts, including a zoonotic disease specialist, a museum data scientist and a salamander biologist, have combined their skills and created a statistical model that accurately predicts the activity of West Nile virus in an area up to six months in advance.
- The model was trained using two decades of sentinel chicken data. The original data files were destroyed in a flood, and the study was only possible because a University of Florida professor kept a personal copy in his lab.
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