From Data to Knowledge to Wisdom: Lessons Learned From the Vancouver Rat Project

Over the past 15 years, the Vancouver Rat Project has been striving to understand, monitor, and manage urban rats and rat-related impacts to human health and well-being in North American cities. One of the key things this interdisciplinary research has shown is that, while research has traditionally focused on the individual components of the "rat problem," rat-related harms are created, magnified, or mitigated at the interfaces among rats, people, and the environment. Similarly, though each scientific discipline can provide data to help characterize, monitor, and mitigate rat-associated harms, it is the interface between these disciplines from which the knowledge to solve current rat problems emerges, and from which we can create the wisdom needed to predict and prevent future issues. This review describes how we combined epidemiology, ecology, pathology, pathogen genomics, population genetics, policy analysis, social sciences, and more to change the way we assess, monitor, and mitigate diverse risks associated with urban rats.