Building a global atlas of wildlife disease data

Overview

To prevent future pandemics, scientists need the ability to track pathogen spread through animal populations like meteorologists track storms. However, biologists currently have no way to pool their pathogen data into a central database, limiting research and policy-making capabilities. We supported a university research team led by global change biologist Colin Carlson to build the technical infrastructure for an open repository of animal disease detection data to make untapped scientific data meaningful, explorable, and actionable for ecology and public health research.

The challenge

Scientists studying wildlife diseases work in isolation, with valuable pathogen data scattered across individual research projects and institutions. Without a centralized database that is easy to contribute to and use, researchers cannot effectively collaborate to anticipate where and when pathogens are likely to jump from animals to humans. The lack of a unified system prevents the scientific community from leveraging collective knowledge to address critical challenges in public health.

Our contribution

Blue Tiger provided software engineering support to build the technical infrastructure for this open repository.

We developed the core functionality needed to make wildlife disease data searchable and accessible to researchers worldwide. More specifically, we:

• Built a comprehensive search feature that allows users to query the centralized database across multiple dimensions – including pathogen type, host species, and observation dates – using reusable, accessible, and highly maintainable components.
• Developed a testing framework that runs automated tests of AWS Lambda functions locally against a temporary Docker instance of a PostgreSQL database, eliminating the need to test within AWS infrastructure and improving development efficiency.
• Implemented a battery of integration tests to ensure the codebase remains easy to maintain and extend as the repository grows and evolves.

The results

As a result of this effort, we:

• Successfully contributed to the development of the wildlife disease data repository, delivering the technical foundation needed for the first release of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP).
• Built search functionality and robust testing framework to enable researchers to efficiently explore disease data and contribute their findings to the global effort to prevent future pandemics.

Team members

• Raphael Krut-Landau

Practices used

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