Quantifying long-term landscape vegetation dynamics in and around Kibale National Park, Uganda, to establish appropriate landscapes for zoonotic disease models

• Sadie J. Ryan

Abstract
Models of zoonotic diseases, particularly those at the spillover interface, require a certain degree of spatial information that theoretical, spatially implicit models cannot always encompass. This is often the situation for parasitic or locally contaminant infectious diseases, or location-specific reservoirs that re-infect populations. For these types of diseases, particularly those that may be the subject of vaccination programs, agent-based models incorporating explicit landscapes may provide a more appropriate framework for analyzing disease spread. However, introducing the complexity of geographically explicit landscape interactions, particularly with temporal dynamics, is irrelevant if the mechanisms and agency of disease spread within that landscape is not reducible to patterns at a scale meaningful to the model’s mechanistic drivers. In this project I propose to examine a specific landscape, Kibale National Park, Uganda, in which primate parasitic disease, anthropogenic fragmentation and climate change are posited to be interacting. I am currently working on agent-based models of zoonotic diseases, particularly addressing the human-primate interface, and would like to complement this work with quantified, data-driven dynamic landscapes. This will lay the groundwork for similar approaches in other sites and scenarios, such as Ebola vaccination in gorillas (with P. Walsh, NCEAS working group) and control of SIV or respiratory disease transmission in Gombe chimpanzees (with M. Wilson and A. Pusey, Jane Goodall Institute, MN).