Date of Award

4-4-2019

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Department

Mathematics

First Advisor

Shandelle M. Henson

Abstract

White-nose syndrome (WNS), caused by the invasive fungal patho­gen Pseudogymnoascus destructans, is a virulent disease that has plagued North American bat populations since 2006. Over the past decade WNS has rapidly spread throughout much of the Eastern and Mid­ western United States, leading to mass mortality and threatening re­gional extinction in a number of bat species. Thus, the need for development and implementation of effective control strategies has become increasingly exigent. While previous mathematical modelling studies have evaluated the efficacy of several proposed treatment methods, nothing is known about the impact of seasonal bat dispersal on such potential interventions. We investigate how spatial disease dynamics could affect the success of five promising WNS control strategies by posing and analysing a two-subpopulation mathematical model with migration. We demonstrate that the most effective management decisions must take interpopulation movement into account, and find that the effect of dispersal on control efficacy is mostly negative but depends on both the control combination and the primary mode of disease transmission.

Subject Area

White-nose syndrome; Bats--Diseases; Pseudogymnoasus destructans

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/honors/216

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