Modelling resource-driven movements of livestock herds to predict the impact of climate change on network dynamics
Sulaimon, T. A.; Ekwem, D.; Finch, D.; Palmer, P. I.; Cleaveland, S.; Enright, J.; Johnson, P. C. D.; Kao, R. R.
Show abstract
In East Africa, climate change is likely to profoundly impact livestock management and the potential spread of infectious diseases. Here, we developed a network model to describe livestock movements to grazing and watering sites, fitted it to data from the Serengeti district of Tanzania, and used it to explore how projected changes in resource availability due to climate change could impact future network structures and therefore infectious disease risks, using 2050 and 2080 as exemplar scenarios. Our modelled networks show increased connections between villages in grazing and watering networks, with connectivity increasing further in the future in correspondence with changes in vegetation and water availability. Our analyses show that targeted interventions to efficiently control regional disease spread may become more difficult, as village connectivity increases and disease vulnerability becomes more evenly distributed. This analysis also provides proof of principle for a novel approach applicable to agropastoral settings across many developing countries, where livestock trade plays a crucial role in maintaining local livelihoods but also in spreading disease.
Matching journals
The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Spatial distribution of poultry farms using point pattern modelling: a method to address livestock environmental impacts and disease transmission risks 96%
- Data-driven Analysis of Fine-Scale Badger Movement in the UK 95%
- Call detail record aggregation methodology impacts infectious disease models informed by human mobility 94%
Similar papers in this journal
- Where to refine spatial data to improve accuracy in crop disease modelling: an analytical approach with examples for cassava 92%
- The kinetic Ising model encapsulates essential dynamics of land pattern change 92%
- Modeling COVID-19 outbreaks in United States with distinct testing, lockdown speed and fatigue rates 92%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.