Research spotlight: Modeling how diseases spread
Published:
In order to predict and fight animal disease outbreaks, epidemiologists and other researchers need to understand how a given disease spreads through landscapes and populations. Factors contributing to the ability of a pathogen to spread include the features of the environment as well as the movement of the animals through that landscape. Human activity is changing landscapes, with the result that they are becoming increasingly heterogeneous (with differences occurring across the landscape). The effect of this increasing heterogeneity on the spread of disease is unclear…