Lincoln Fox Project

This iNaturalist project is part of a larger wildlife research project taking place through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln School of Natural Resources. Our research is focused on understanding the distribution, diets, and disease exposure of red foxes in urban and rural areas of Lancaster County, Nebraska. Red foxes can serve as sentinels of many diseases including zoonotic diseases, which are shared by animals and people. Investigating diseases in local red fox populations can provide important information on wildlife health and the presence of viruses, bacteria, and parasites in our urban and rural environments that could be transmitted to people or pets.

The numbers and diet of foxes in an area can influence their exposure to disease in the environment and through contact with other animals. Therefore, estimating red fox abundance in urban and rural areas is an important step in understanding disease distribution and transmission. Our project is focused on red foxes as sentinels, but we are also asking members to report sightings of coyotes and grey foxes. If you are unsure about what species you observed, please follow this link: https://www.inaturalist.org/lists/906985-Lincoln-Fox-Projects-Species-List?rank=species. When adding a new observation, please add a photo to your observation whenever possible, this makes it easy for us to confirm the species ID.

Citizen science projects are a relatively new method of estimating abundance of wildlife species. We intend to compare the results from this project with more traditional methods, including scat surveys and presence-absence surveys.

This iNaturalist journal will be updated periodically to keep members up to date on the project. Also, check out the following link for more information about zoonotic diseases and other One Health resources: http://nebraskaonehealth.unl.edu. menos ↑