The Thoughts Behind the Model: Talking About the Decisions Made in Creating an Improved Wildlife Disease Model
Category: Oral Presentation
Author(s): Bianca Anderson
Presenter(s): Bianca Anderson
Mentors(s): Antony Cheng
This project complements my poster presentation project focused on sharing the current results of my wildlife disease model creation project. The entire course of this work has been oriented towards overcoming the deficiencies of human-centric Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) models when applied to wildlife populations and disease outbreaks. Such deficiencies include a lack of accommodation for predation, the chances of advancing from one life stage to another, and the fact that, unlike humans, most animals in a population aren’t vaccinated. From the beginning, documentation of the process and thinking through each decision with the model have been critical in order to maximize potential accuracy and factor in population dynamics as much as possible. Ensuring future interchangeable parameter values between different species and diseases was also a critical design feature that had to be accounted for. Important steps in this process have been creating code visualizations, testing individual code segments outside of the main code, and finding adequate data to make the model usable via literature synthesis. The oral presentation side of this project highlights my reasoning behind these decisions, evaluates the challenges I’ve encountered during model development, and outlines the next steps for this model.