Achievement

A recently discovered chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), is having devastating effects on amphibian populations throughout the world. In the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, Bd has led to hundreds of local extinctions of frog populations, but a few populations are persisting with Bd. UCSB IGERT Trainees and computer science PhD students Marc Griesemer and Brian Drawert have been collaborating with UCSB ecologist Cheryl Briggs in an effort to determine which strategies (for example, cleaning or culling a fraction of the frogs) are likely to be most effective against this pathogen. They have developed both ordinary differential equation and stochastic models to describe the spread of the fungus in frog populations, and to determine their likelihood for survival given a range of possible interventions. A paper is in progress.