Building a global atlas of wildlife disease data

The challenge

To prevent the next pandemic, it will be essential to anticipate where and when pathogens are likely to jump from animals to humans. If we could track the spread of pathogens through the animal world like we track storms, that ability would be transformative for the field of ecology and public health. But there is a simple barrier to doing this effectively: biologists today have no way to pool their pathogen data into a central database. If this database existed and were easy to contribute to and use, that would greatly facilitate research and policy-making. How can we make this database a reality so scientists make all their untapped data meaningful, explorable, and actionable?

Our contribution

To solve this problem, a university research team led by global change biologist Colin Carlson is building an open repository of animal disease detection data. Blue Tiger provided software engineering support to this effort.

We wrote responsive, accessible, and user-friendly code. More specifically:

• We built a feature that allows users to search the centralized database along several dimensions – such as the pathogen, the host, and the date the pathogen was observed – using reusable, accessible, highly maintainable components
• We developed a way to run automated tests of AWS Lambda functions locally against a temporary Docker instance of a PostgreSQL database, eliminating the need to run those tests inside the AWS infrastructure
• To ensure that the code remains easy to maintain and extend, we added a battery of integration tests&

The results

We contributed to the development of the wildlife disease data repository in preparation for the first release of the Minimal Viable Product.

Team members

• Raphael Krut-Landau

Practices used

• Responsive design
• Accessible design
• Agile development
• RESTful API architecture