• Evaluation of animal health surveillance system is the determination of the merit of a surveillance system/component, by confronting the results of the assessment with standards targets, criteria or a counterfactual system. This process shall be transparent, objective and evidence-based.

• The outcome of an evaluation is a judgement and /or recommendations placed in the overall surveillance context. An evaluation can be performed at any development stage of the surveillance system. Ideally, an evaluation is conducted in regular intervals in line with the policy cycle, by internal and/or external evaluators.

• One, several or all components in the surveillance system and any number of attributes and/or criteria can be considered, depending on the evaluation question and the context.

This definition was developed based on a literature review of evaluation and evaluation of animal health terminology ( and reviewed by animal health and evaluation experts within RISKSUR EU project (A. Meyer et al., 2015).