It’s been some time coming, but today I’m proud to announce a new paper of ours that has just come out in Journal of Applied Ecology. While not strictly a conservation paper, it does provide some novel tools for modelling populations of threatened species in ways not available before.
The Genesis
A few years ago, a few of us (Bob Lacy, Phil Miller and JP Pollak of Vortex fame, Barry Brook, and a few others) got together in a little room at the Brookfield Zoo in the suburban sprawl of Chicago to have a crack at some new modelling approaches the Vortex crew had recently designed. The original results were pleasing, so we had a follow-up meeting last year (thanks to a few generous Zoo benefactors) and added a few post-docs and students to the mix (Damien Fordham, Clive McMahon, Tom Prowse, Mike Watts, Michelle Verant). The great population modeller Resit Akçakaya also came along to assist and talk about linkages with RAMAS.
Out of that particular meeting a series of projects was spawned, and one of those has now been published online: Novel coupling of individual-based epidemiological and demographic models predicts realistic dynamics of tuberculosis in alien buffalo.
The Coupling
So what’s so novel about modelling disease in buffalo, and why would one care? Well, here’s the interesting part. The buffalo-tuberculosis example was a great way to examine just how well a new suite of models – and their command-centre module – predicted disease dynamics in a wild population. The individual-based population modelling software Vortex has been around for some time, and is now particularly powerful for predicting the extinction risk of small populations; the newest addition to the Vortex family, called Outbreak, is also an individual-based epidemiological model that allows a population of individuals exposed to a pathogen to progress over time (e.g., from susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered/dead). Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 