Disease outbreak thresholds emerge from interactions between movement behavior, landscape structure, and epidemiology
Authored by Lauren A White, James D Forester, Meggan E Craft
Date Published: 2018
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1801383115
Sponsors:
United States National Science Foundation (NSF)
Platforms:
R
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
https://github.com/whit1951/landscape-sim
Abstract
Disease models have provided conflicting evidence as to whether spatial
heterogeneity promotes or impedes pathogen persistence. Moreover, there
has been limited theoretical investigation into how animal movement
behavior interacts with the spatial organization of resources (e.g.,
clustered, random, uniform) across a landscape to affect infectious
disease dynamics. Importantly, spatial heterogeneity of resources can
sometimes lead to nonlinear or counterintuitive outcomes depending on
the host and pathogen system. There is a clear need to develop a general
theoretical framework that could be used to create testable predictions
for specific host-pathogen systems. Here, we develop an individual-based
model integrated with movement ecology approaches to investigate how
host movement behaviors interact with landscape heterogeneity (in the
form of various levels of resource abundance and clustering) to affect
pathogen dynamics. For most of the parameter space, our results support
the counterintuitive idea that fragmentation promotes pathogen
persistence, but this finding was largely dependent on perceptual range
of the host, conspecific density, and recovery rate. For simulations
with high conspecific density, slower recovery rates, and larger
perceptual ranges, more complex disease dynamics emerged, and the most
fragmented landscapes were not necessarily the most conducive to
outbreaks or pathogen persistence. These results point to the importance
of interactions between landscape structure, individual movement
behavior, and pathogen transmission for predicting and understanding
disease dynamics.
Tags
Spatial heterogeneity
connectivity
Management
Heterogeneity
Landscape fragmentation
Animal movement
transmission
Infectious-diseases
Pathogen
Persistence
Perceptual range
Selection functions
Disease model
Resource
selection function
Random
forests