Project Title: "Modeling the human-wildlife interface: primate ecology and the disease spillover boundary"
This project is awarded under the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biological Informatics Program for 2006. The goal of this project is to develop a spatially explicit, agent-based framework of interactions between human mediated landscape change and primate social ecology. This will provide a means to assess impacts on primate population from nutritional stress induced by social disruption and susceptibility to disease, especially novel pathogens. The model framework will establish a tool to assess the human-wildlife interface in systems where the large scale impacts of interaction between the landscape and individual behaviors of humans and wildlife may be poorly understood. This project will make use of a very well studied taxon, primates, and a data rich study system in and around Kibale National Park, Uganda. The agent-based framework will allow for interactions of different agents in the model at different scales, both temporal and spatial. The PI will carry out the work at Stanford University under the advice of James Jones. The PI's background in ecology and GIS-based analyses will be expanded to agent-based computational frameworks, and will contribute to a academic career goal supporting a computational approach to conservation ecology and mathematical biology. Understanding spatial dynamics of complex ecosystems in which humans are actors is fundamental to that goal. This training will reinforce the links between quantitative ecology and empirical data manipulation which can be used to answer important questions in conservation ecology.
