A bio-economic ‘war game’ model to simulate plant disease incursions and test response strategies at the landscape scale
- Resource Type
- Original Paper
- Authors
- Cook, David C.; Aurambout, Jean-Philippe; Villalta, Oscar N.; Liu, Shuang; Edwards, Jacqueline; Maharaj, Savi
- Source
- Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food. February 2016 8(1):37-48
- Subject
- Biosecurity
Agent-based modelling
Pest and disease management
Invasive alien species
Landscape pathology
Plant health
NetLogo
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 1876-4517
1876-4525
Loss of area freedom from invasive alien species can have serious food security implications and place huge responsibility on incursion response managers. They make critical decisions despite profound uncertainty surrounding invasion ecology, surveillance and control technology effectiveness and human behaviour. We propose a spatially-explicit model that can aid response managers in devising and testing management strategies in a virtual world where the costs of failure are negligible. We apply the model in a group-based decision setting in which participants practise responding to fictional disease incursions in a pome fruit production area in Australia. Using the model, the response management group was able to develop mutually satisfactory rules of thumb for the use of quarantine and destruction zones and for when to withdraw resources from eradication efforts.