The Wildlife Futures Program, a science-based, wildlife health program serves to increase disease surveillance, management and research to better protect wildlife across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and beyond.
The Wildlife Futures Program provides:
The Wildlife Futures Program's 12 employees (one of them working full-time out of the Game Commission’s Harrisburg headquarters) are dedicated to addressing wildlife diseases.
Benefits include:
- The ability to better define wildlife diseases, their impacts, and how we can manage them
- Freeing up agency biologists to spend more time focusing on managing wildlife populations
- The coordination of disease responses across agencies, our hunting community, and the general public
For hunters who submit samples from deer they harvest for chronic wasting disease (CWD) testing, the partnership will provide much faster turnaround for test results – about 10 to 21 days – as well as the ability to track test results online.