Incorporating Landscape Heterogeneities in the Spread of an Epidemic in Wildlife (original) (raw)

The paper presents a model that incorporates landscape heterogeneities into the spread of wildlife epidemics, specifically rabies in raccoons in New York State. By combining a standard SEI epidemiological model with a diffusion process, the authors aim to better represent animal movement across various geographical features compared to traditional discretized models. The use of a continuous model facilitates the integration of geographic details and promises a competitive computational cost, while improvements in parameter estimation through Bayesian methods are under investigation.