Modelling the Effects of Climate Change on Mosquito-Borne Diseases

气候变化正在对疾病传播的生物和非生物驱动因素产生深远影响。然而，预测单个疾病对气候变化的反应具有挑战性，需要新的预测框架。对于蚊子传播的疾病，蚊子的生活期占据着不同的生态位，司机可能会以复杂和相反的方式影响病理系统的组成部分。例如，季节性降雨和温度模式的变化可能会影响发育、存活、生育和疾病传播等不同的生活史特征。这些特征加在一起可能会引起物种丰度和传播动态的急剧变化，特别是在极端气候变化的情况下，这会影响我们预测蚊子种群动态的能力，以及疾病爆发和随后缓解措施的影响的可能性。本项目的目的是调查气候变化在推动蚊子种群及其疾病的季节性变化中所起的作用。学生将开发和分析一个状态依赖的延迟微分方程组，其中环境驱动因素影响生活史特征。将使用适当的编程语言，通过广泛的数学和数值模拟技术对模型进行分析。这位学生将扩展蚊子模型，将疾病传播包括在内，以调查气候变化将如何影响未来气候中疾病爆发的可能性。此外，学生将根据VectorBite研究协调网络提供的新的和现有的特征和时空数据集来验证模型。

Climate change is having a profound effect on biotic and abiotic drivers of disease spread. However, predicting how individual diseases respond to climate change is challenging to predict and requires new predictive frameworks. For mosquito-borne diseases, where mosquito life-stages occupy different niches, drivers may affect components of the pathosystem in complex and opposing ways. For example, changes in the patterns of seasonal rainfall and temperature, can affect variable life-history traits such as development, survival, fecundity and disease transmission. These traits may combine to give rise to sharp changes of species abundance and transmission dynamics, especially under climate change extremes, which impacts on our ability to predict mosquito population dynamics and the likelihood of disease outbreaks and subsequent impact of mitigation measures.The aim of this project is to investigate the role of climate change in driving seasonal variability in mosquito populations and their diseases. The student will develop and analyse a system of state-dependent delayed differential equations in which environmental drivers affect life-history traits. The model will be analysed by extensive mathematical and numerical simulation techniques using a suitable programming language. The student will extend the mosquito model to include disease transmission to investigate how climate change will shape the likelihood of disease outbreaks in future climates. In addition, the student will validate the models against new and existing trait and spatial-temporal datasets provided by the VectorBite Research Coordination Network.