Meeting Abstract
Ecological and societal communities concurrently change and reassemble in response to one another following a traumatic event such as a natural disaster. This recovery process can potentially provide opportunities for commensal pest species to recover and spread quickly. Norway rats are common urban pests that can carry and transmit several zoonotic pathogens, posing a potential health risk to humans and domestic animals. Though they are globally widespread, little is known about how natural and human-related changes in urban landscapes affect the population dynamics and movement of this species. As part of an interdisciplinary project investigating recovery of human and natural systems in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, we are designing and implementing framework for modeling movement and dynamics of Norway rat populations across a spatially heterogeneous urban habitat. This model consists of a network of locations in which parameters of the population dynamics are determined by local conditions. I will describe how network structure relates to the likelihood and speed of network occupancy in an invasion or re-population scenario, and how local population densities relate to network neighborhood properties. I will also present model results that describe outcomes of applying strategies for controlling the spread of rats and rodent-borne diseases by altering properties of network nodes (locations), and edges (movement routes). Finally, I will describe how we are using extensive data being gathered on rat demographics and genetics through a trapping census study, ground cover vegetation data, and GIS data to parameterize movement and life history features in the model and explore hypotheses of gene flow and invasion across the New Orleans landscape.
