Colin Carlson, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

What makes the difference between an adequate model (useful in the short term for urgent decisions) and a robust, ecologically-supported one? In this talk I’ll present and unpack two problems. In the short term, consensus-building has become a major research and policy problem for mapping Zika virus—one that is still relevant, given tradeoffs between vector control and other ecological issues. In the long term, predicting how tick distributions will shift in response to climate change would be greatly improved by the ability to jointly model host and tick distributional shifts—especially given the role of host communities in tick-borne zoonoses like Lyme disease and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever—but these technologies are severely underdeveloped. New models will be presented that address both of these case studies, and highlight where our field is headed in the face of accelerating threats.