Coronaviruses are closely monitored in the context of emerging diseases and, as illustrated with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV), are known to cross the species barrier and eventually to move from wildlife to humans. Knowledge of the diversity of coronaviruses in wildlife is therefore essential to better understand and prevent emergence events. This study explored the presence of coronaviruses in four wild mammal orders in France: Bats, rodents, lagomorphs, and hedgehogs. Betacoronavirus and Alphacoronavirus genera were identified. The results obtained suggest the circulation of potentially evolving virus strains, with the potential to cross the species barrier.

We consider the cumulative residual entropy (CRE) a recently introduced measure of entropy. While in previous works distributions with positive support are considered, we generalize the definition of CRE to the case of distributions with general support. We show that several interesting properties of the earlier CRE remain valid and supply further properties and insight to problems such as maximum CRE power moment problems. In addition, we show that this generalized CRE can be used as an alternative to differential entropy to derive information-based optimization criteria for system identification purpose.