Assessing the Role of Climate Variability on Liver Fluke Risk in the UK Through Mechanistic Hydro-Epidemiological Modelling
Abstract
Liver fluke is a flatworm parasite infecting grazing animals worldwide. In the UK, it causes considerable production losses to cattle and sheep industries and costs farmers millions of pounds each year due to reduced growth rates and lower milk yields. Large part of the parasite life-cycle takes place outside of the host, with its survival and development strongly controlled by climatic and hydrologic conditions. Evidence of climate-driven changes in the distribution and seasonality of fluke disease already exists, as the infection is increasingly expanding to new areas and becoming a year-round problem. Therefore, it is crucial to assess current and potential future impacts of climate variability on the disease to guide interventions at the farm scale and mitigate risk. Climate-based fluke risk models have been available since the 1950s, however, they are based on empirical relationships derived between historical climate and incidence data, and thus are unlikely to be robust for simulating risk under changing conditions. Moreover, they are not dynamic, but estimate risk over large regions in the UK based on monthly average climate conditions, so they do not allow investigating the effects of climate variability for supporting farmers' decisions. In this study, we introduce a mechanistic model for fluke, which represents habitat suitability for disease development at 25m resolution with a daily time step, explicitly linking the parasite life-cycle to key hydro-climate conditions. The model is used on a case study in the UK and sensitivity analysis is performed to better understand the role of climate variability on the space-time dynamics of the disease, while explicitly accounting for uncertainties. Comparisons are presented with experts' knowledge and a widely used empirical model.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFMGC53E1346B
- Keywords:
-
- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1807 Climate impacts;
- HYDROLOGY