VooDoo project: Pollinator health in natural, seminatural and urban landscape, from individual interactions to complex transmission networks

Pollinator health and tripartite networks - the contact story of insects, plants and pathogens

Our group supports a large scale multi-national field sampling effort by building individual-based models of the foraging behaviour of multi-species insect communities aiming to elucidate emergent pathogen dynamics on the community level and thereby helping to find and interpret relevant patterns in the empirical data.

Our efforts are currently focussed on the design and implementation of a suitable model that allows us to

• explore a spatiotemporally explicit description of insect flight and specific foraging behaviour
• parametrise physiological traits of individual insects using literature research and expert knowledge elicitation
• using detailed GIS data sets on small scale land use to simulate realistic landscape structures
  
• analyse universal patterns in indirect multi-species pathogen transmission by implementing idealised infection sub models
  
• facilitate participatory engagement by real time 3D visualisation of model landscape using the open source Godot engine
  
• increase transparency by making both model and support code available as Free Software and by combining ODD and literate programming
• handle the computational costs of hundreds of thousands of entities and tens of millions of time steps using parallel and distributed computing