The current hpai outbreak in the U.S. Is unprecedented and expanding

The University of California, Davis was awarded a $999,374 Project Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program on March 15, 2025. The grant will support a 4-year research project to comprehensively evaluate the relationships between on-farm and off-farm risk factors for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks in commercial poultry facilities across 30 states. The project aims to develop an agent-based model for predicting HPAI risk from waterfowl abundance and integrate it with standardized biosecurity scoring to provide a comprehensive risk assessment tool. The tool will be made available through the Waterfowl Alert Network web platform, and stakeholder meetings will be organized to share research insights on off-farm HPAI risk factors.

Previous USDA effortsemployed ebird waterfowl observations and farmer surveys to identify waterfowl presence as oneof the significant factors for outbreaks of hpai in commercial poultry. Using radar and telemetry-basedmodels of waterfowl abundance, we identified similar patterns at 144X higher spatialresolution facilitating more targeted risk management at the farm level. In addition, by combiningthese higher resolution risk factors with on-farm risk factors (i.e. operational and physicalbiosecurity), the positive predictive value of an hpai outbreak at the farm level increased by 3.5X.here we propose to comprehensively evaluate the relationships between on-farm and off-farm riskfactors on over 9,000 premises in 30 states. Specifically, an agent-based model for prediction ofhpai risk from waterfowl will be combined with standardized biosecurity scoring to predict overallrisk to commercial poultry facilities. This risk model will be integrated into an existing commercialweb-tool (WATERFOWLALERTNETWORK) where utilization of the tool and adoption of best practicessuggested by the model will be evaluated at a company, industry and government level. Finally, stakeholder meetings will be organized in order to extend knowledge with a focus on sharing offfarm(e.g. habitat, season) based insights. Our overall goal is to provide an intuitive and accessiblerisk assessment tool to stakeholders to guide implementation of a comprehensive biosecurity plan toprevent hpai outbreaks and transmission at a farm, company and regional level