Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nmvwc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-06T17:58:37.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter Twenty-two - Sylvatic plague in Central Asia: a case study of abundance thresholds

from Part III - Understanding wildlife disease ecology at the community and landscape level

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2019

Kenneth Wilson
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Andy Fenton
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
Dan Tompkins
Affiliation:
Predator Free 2050 Ltd
Get access

Summary

Abundance thresholds are of fundamental importance in our attempts to understand the dynamics of wildlife infection. Identifying and manipulating these thresholds may also have substantial applied significance. The plague system in the Pre-Balkhash region of Kazakhstan has been extensively studied, including an unusually thorough investigation of the nature and importance of an abundance threshold for the infection. Great gerbils are the main reservoir host, with plague transmitted between them by a variety of flea species. Initial work identified such a threshold from time-series data, with great gerbil abundance being measured by level of occupancy (the proportion of the burrow systems in the landscape supporting an extended family group). However, this and other refinements of the threshold were better at predicting the absence of plague (below the threshold) than in guaranteeing its presence (above). Further analysis indicated that the threshold was a critical point in the percolation of plague across the landscape, rather than in a mass-action random mixing process. The performance of the threshold was also improved by incorporating both gerbil and flea abundance to generate a hyperbolic threshold curve.

Type
Chapter
Information
Wildlife Disease Ecology
Linking Theory to Data and Application
, pp. 623 - 643
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Addink, E.A., De Jong, S.M., Davis, S.A., et al. (2010) The use of high-resolution remote sensing for plague surveillance in Kazakhstan. Remote Sensing of Environment, 114, 674681.Google Scholar
Bartlett, M.S. (1957) Measles periodicity and community size. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 120, 4871.Google Scholar
Brinkerhoff, R.J., Collinge, S.K., Ray, C. & Gage, K.L. (2010) Rodent and flea abundance fail to predict a plague epizootic in black-tailed prairie dogs. Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, 10, 4752.Google Scholar
Davis, S., Begon, M., De Bruyn, L., et al. (2004) Predictive thresholds for plague in Kazakhstan. Science, 304, 736738.Google Scholar
Davis, S., Klassovskiy, N., Ageyev, V., et al. (2007a) Plague metapopulation dynamics in a natural reservoir: the burrow system as the unit of study. Epidemiology and Infection, 135, 740748.Google Scholar
Davis, S., Leirs, H., Viljugrein, H., et al. (2007b) Empirical assessment of a threshold model for sylvatic plague. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 4, 649657.Google Scholar
Davis, S., Trapman, P., Leirs, H., Begon, M. & Heesterbeek, J.A.P. (2008) The abundance threshold for plague as a critical percolation phenomenon. Nature, 454, 634637.Google Scholar
Grassberger, P. (1983) On the critical behaviour of the general epidemic process and dynamical percolation. Mathematical Biosciences, 63, 157172.Google Scholar
Heier, L., Storvik, G.O., Davis, S.A., et al. (2011) Emergence, spread, persistence and fade-out of sylvatic plague in Kazakhstan. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 278, 29152923.Google Scholar
Holt, R.D., Dobson, A.P., Begon, M., Bowers, R.G. & Schauber, E.M. (2003) Parasite establishment in host communities. Ecology Letters, 6, 837842.Google Scholar
Kausrud, K.L., Viljugrein, H., Frigessi, A., et al. (2007) Climatically-driven synchrony of gerbil populations allows large-scale plague outbreaks. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 274, 19631969.Google Scholar
Keeling, M.J. & Rohani, P.R. (2008) Modeling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levick, B., Laudisoit, A., Wilschut, L., et al. (2015) The perfect burrow, but for what? Identifying local habitat conditions promoting the presence of the hosts and vectors of the Kazakh plague system. PLoS ONE, 10, e0136962.Google Scholar
Lloyd-Smith, J.O., Cross, P.C., Briggs, C.J., et al. (2005) Should we expect population thresholds for wildlife disease? Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20, 511519.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morse, SS. (1995) Factors in the emergence of infectious diseases. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 1, 715.Google Scholar
Onishchenko, G.G. & Kutyrev, V.V. (2004) Natural Plague Foci in the Caucasus, Caspian Sea Region, Middle Asia and Siberia. Moscow: Meditsina [in Russian].Google Scholar
Reijniers, J., Begon, M., Ageyev, V. & Leirs, H. (2014) Plague epizootic cycles in Central Asia. Biology Letters, 10, 20140302.Google Scholar
Reijniers, J., Davis, S., Begon, M., et al. (2012) A curve of thresholds governs plague epizootics in Central Asia. Ecology Letters, 15, 554560.Google Scholar
Samia, N.I., Chan, K.S. & Stenseth, N.C. (2007) A generalized threshold mixed model for analyzing nonnormal nonlinear time series, with application to plague in Kazakhstan. Biometrika, 94, 101118.Google Scholar
Samia, N.I., Kausrud, K.L., Heesterbeek, H., et al. (2011) Dynamics of the plague–wildlife–human system in Central Asia are controlled by two epidemiological thresholds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 14,52714,532.Google Scholar
Stenseth, N.C., Atshabar, B.B., Begon, M., et al. (2008) Plague: past, present and future. PLoS Medicine, 5, 913.Google Scholar
Webb, C.T., Brooks, C.P., Gage, K.L. & Antolin, M.F. (2006) Classic flea borne transmission does not drive plague epizootics in prairie dogs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 62366241.Google Scholar
Wilschut, L.I., Addink, E.A. Heesterbeek, J.A.P., et al. (2013a) Mapping the distribution of the main host for plague in a complex landscape in Kazakhstan: an object-based approach using SPOT-5 XS, Landsat 7 ETM+, SRTM and multiple Random Forests. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 23, 8194.Google Scholar
Wilschut, L.I., Addink, E.A., Heesterbeek, H., et al. (2013b) Potential corridors and barriers for plague spread in central Asia. International Journal of Health Geographics, 12, 49.Google Scholar
Wilschut, L.I., Laudisoit, A., Hughes, N.K., et al. (2015) Spatial distribution patterns of plague hosts: point pattern analysis of the burrows of great gerbils in Kazakhstan. Journal of Biogeography, 42, 12811292.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×