Model‐guided fieldwork: practical guidelines for multidisciplinary research on wildlife ecological and epidemiological dynamics

Abstract

Infectious disease ecology has recently raised its public profile beyond the scientific community due to the major threats that wildlife infections pose to biological conservation, animal welfare, human health and food security. As we start unravelling the full extent of emerging infectious diseases, there is an urgent need to facilitate multidisciplinary research in this area. Even though research in ecology has always had a strong theoretical component, cultural and technical hurdles often hamper direct collaboration between theoreticians and empiricists. Building upon our collective experience of multidisciplinary research and teaching in this area, we propose practical guidelines to help with effective integration among mathematical modelling, fieldwork and laboratory work. Modelling tools can be used at all steps of a field-based research programme, from the formulation of working hypotheses to field study design and data analysis. We illustrate our model-guided fieldwork framework with two case studies we have been conducting on wildlife infectious diseases: plague transmission in prairie dogs and lyssavirus dynamics in American and African bats. These demonstrate that mechanistic models, if properly integrated in research programmes, can provide a framework for holistic approaches to complex biological systems.

Covariation between the physiological and behavioral components of pathogen transmission: host heterogeneity determines epidemic outcomes

“…Understanding how and when variability in pathogen transmission should be modelled is a crucial next step for the field of disease ecology and is a critical refinement for future modeling strategies. Through an iterative approach to empirical experiments and modeling (Restif et al 2012), and additional collaboration between the fields of animal behavior, ecoimmunology and disease ecology, we can improve disease modeling predictions to account for heterogeneity in contact rate and host physiology, as well as the potential feedbacks between these critical facets of pathogen transmission.…”

Urbanization and Disease Emergence: Dynamics at the Wildlife–Livestock–Human Interface

“…In response, disease ecologists have moved towards adopting principles from community ecology; including metapopulation and network theory , trait-based approaches and a consideration of processes acting across biological scales 27, 53, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89. The development of new modeling techniques will play a key role, and several frameworks have been suggested, that focus on integrating broad methodologies and crossdisciplinary collaborations to investigate causation in disease emergence 53, 90, 91. Such methods will be key to unraveling the structural complexity of ecological communities at wildlife–livestock–human interfaces, and thus understanding how they function as epidemiological systems prior to disease emergence.…”

Characterising African tick communities at a wild–domestic interface using repeated sampling protocols and models

“…Field protocols where sites or hosts are repeatedly sampled within short time periods (Bailey et al, 2004) and statistical models specifically designed to be fitted to the resulting data allow simultaneous estimation of detection probabilities and abundance (MacKenzie, 2005;Mackenzie and Royle, 2005). Such methods have however been rarely used so far in disease ecology studies (McClintock et al, 2010;Restif et al, 2012). Another characteristic of parasites such as ticks is that their distribution on hosts or in the environment is often aggregated (Boulinier et al, 1996;Elston et al, 2001), which can have significant implications for the estimations of parameters of populations and communities (Petney et al, 1990).…”