hewhocaves wrote:There are counties on the WNS map that have been "suspected" since 2008-09. Why is that? Have there not be subsequent checks in recent years? Have the checks been inconclusive as well? How many years is appropriate before we change suspected back to "clean"?
John - You are correct in your guess that have not been subsequent checks at many of these sites. You raise a good and interesting question, and I have forwarded it to Cal Butchkoski, creater and keeper of the map.
As Cal reminds us, this is "our" map, speaking to the collective WNS community. How information has been presented has always been the subject of discussion, witness the change in the visual representation of the lone Oklahoma bat that tested positive for Geomyces destructans a year and a half ago. If you recall, a huge block of Oklahoma was marked off in red - an area equal to or greater than the entire WNS-affected NY/NE region with hundreds of thousands of bat deaths. It created essentially a very misleading visual representation of the disease. We pointed that out, and it was changed.
Your question is a good one. Up until now, the map has tracked the growth and spread of WNS. That has been its purpose, and I think it's served us well. However, your point gets to what may be the next evolving management issue for WNS - when do we declare a site clean again? If it's surrounded by nearby infected sites, does that serve a real purpose, given how easily bats move? Thus, it may not make sense to remove a county in New York, for example, but what about the Missouri sites? There were only suspect sites found last year; all clean in MO this year. I would suspect there would be resistance to taking down the MO suspect sites right now, with the confirmation of new sites near the MO border in both TN and KY.
In discussing the status of the disease, most knowledgeable folks understand the distinction between suspect and confirmed. In public documents, agencies, NGO's and even the media are being more careful about how things are phrased. WNS has spread as far west as western Tennessee, but the fungus associated with it has been founds on bats in MO and OK (at least last year, but clean this year in both cases).
One other important factor is at play here: simple lack of resources to monitor and sample at each and every site, even ones already sampled. As we know, funding has been historically limited for monitoring listed species, or specifically funded grant projects at major hibernacula, for example. Additional samples in the WNS era have come when someone, often a caver, has sighted something suspicious and a subsequent sample was taken and analyzed. With major declines in some bat species in the WNS regions, scientists are loath to take unnecessary samples. All of this factors into the monitoring.