Modeling management strategies for chronic disease in wildlife: predictions for the control of respiratory disease in bighorn sheep

1. Controlling persistent infectious disease in wildlife populations is an on-going challenge for wildlife managers and conservationists worldwide.
2. Here, we develop a dynamic pathogen transmission model capturing key features of M. ovipneumoniae infection, a major cause of population declines in North American bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis). We explore the effects of model assumptions and parameter values on disease dynamics, including density versus frequency dependent transmission, the inclusion of a carrier class versus a longer infectious period, host survival rates, disease-induced mortality and recovery rates, and the epidemic growth rate.
3. We compare the effectiveness of a suite of management actions following an epidemic, including test-and-remove, depopulation-and-reintroduction, range expansion, herd augmentation, and density reduction.
4. Our results suggest that test-and-remove, depopulation-and-reintroduction, and range expansion have the potential to facilitate recov...