Mathematical Biology Seminar: Hans Heesterbeek

Abstract:

The inspiration for this work comes from wanting to understand more of infectious disease agents spreading in wildlife populations. Such populations often have a metapopulation structure, where groups of individuals living in suitable habitat patches are separated from each other in space, but linked through migration. A key example we have focussed on is the great gerbil, a rodent species from Kazakhstan forming vast metapopulations, and the spread of plague in this system. In the lecture I will use the plague-great gerbil system to illustrate various aspects of thresholds and spread, touching on both theoretical and biological insights. An example of the former is a non-linear relation between persistence time in a spatial metapopulation and migration, showing an optimum for intermediate migration activity. An example of the latter is using percolation to explain the spread of plague through a metapopulation landscape of great gerbils and threshold behaviour in that system from long-term data sets, including a possible threshold for zoonotic spread to humans.