Celine Snedden, a Mathematics major at the University of California Berkeley, worked with Drs. Richard Hall and Sonia Altizer to look at how supplemental feeding of wildlife can affect disease spread.
Abstract: Recreational and unintentional feeding of wildlife occurs frequently but can have negative consequences, such as increasing pathogen transmission within provisioned sites. However, it is unclear how resource supplementation influences the spatial spread of pathogens. Provisioning could increase pathogen spread if the corresponding sites produce more offspring with higher dispersal success; alternatively, supplementation might reduce pathogen spread if provisioned sites promote site fidelity. Infection may also affect spatial dynamics by reducing wildlife mobility. In this project, we extend the Levins metapopulation model to account for heterogeneity in colonization rates caused by provisioning-induced changes to patch attractiveness, animal site fidelity, and infection-induced costs to movement. We derive two key parameters, the net effect of provisioning on movement (ρ) and the pathogen basic reproductive number (R0) that are crucial determinants of host occupancy and pathogen prevalence. We also explore how increasing the number of provisioned patches across the landscape influences host occupancy and pathogen prevalence under different supplementation scenarios. We find that provisioning should be avoided when infection has only small effects on animal mobility and when supplementation increases net movement of hosts between patches. However, provisioning can be beneficial to hosts when (i) infected patches produce fewer dispersers or when (ii) highly transmissible pathogens are present and supplemental feeding promotes site fidelity. To improve the effects of supplemental feeding on wildlife and decrease the risk of pathogen spillover, future work should aim to obtain empirical estimates of the effects of infection and resource provisioning on animal movement.