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This textbook introduces the core competencies, tools and perspectives to manage free-ranging animal population health and demonstrates their need and relevance to help wildlife cope with the ever-increasing pressures of the Anthropocene, manifested by global megatrends such as climate change, urbanization and pollution. It adapts and adopts key concepts of population health from public health and herd health to a wildlife health context. In a highly-accessible and unique form, this book presents a modern way of approaching wildlife and fish epidemiology, health promotion and disease control, with a focus on the social dimensions of wildlife health management. Aimed at graduate students in veterinary medicine, wildlife researchers and health managers this textbook provides a valuable source of information to foster the knowledge and skills needed to protect and promote the health of free-ranging wildlife.

This benchmark publication assembles information on the current and anticipated effects of climate change on animal health. It empowers educators, managers, practitioners, and researchers by providing evidence, experience, and opinions on what we need to do to prepare for, and cope with, the largest threat ever to have faced animals on this planet. With expert contributors from across the globe, the text equips the reader with information and means to develop sustainable adaptation or mitigation actions. After introducing animal health in a climate change context, chapters look at specific animal health impacts arising from climate change. The book concludes with suggestions on teachable and actionable ideas that could be used to mobilize concepts provided into education or advocacy. This book was written amid the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of ever-increasing reports of on-the-ground, real-life climate impacts. Large scale wildfire and ocean heat waves killed unprecedented numbers of animals, while droughts in some areas and floods in others displaced thousands of livestock and made food scarce for even more. Climate change is real, and it is here. How we respond will have profound implications for people, biodiversity, welfare, conservation, societies, economies, and ecosystems. Today's veterinary educators are awakening to the need to adapt and train a new generation of animal health professionals who can understand and plan for climate change, and this book is an essential resource.