Abstract
Health, although universally valued, does not have a universally shared definition. How we define a management goal, in this case health, sets the boundaries of our actions to meet that goal. Without a shared understanding of how to recognize health, it can be extremely hard to inspire cooperative action toward a shared health goal. This chapter explores three prevailing ways wildlife health has and can be defined: (1) as the absence of disease; (2) as capacity derived from interacting individual, environmental, and social factors that allows the individual or population to cope with all demands of daily life; or (3) as a social construct where individuals or population meet our social and scientific expectations for how they exist and persist in an environment. Concepts of population health can overlap with ideas of robustness and resilience. The clarity we provide for our population health goals will influence how society thinks about and acts on keeping wildlife healthy in a rapidly changing world.
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Stephen, C. (2022). What Is Wildlife Health?. In: Stephen, C. (eds) Wildlife Population Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90510-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90510-1_1
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