VectorBITE 2018: Meeting Recap

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

The VectorBite 2018 meeting just wrapped up a productive week of training and working group meetings at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, CA. This year’s meeting was split into two parts: a three-day training session for post-docs and graduate students followed by two days of working group meetings.

The training covered an introduction to data management, visualization, and fitting models to data and then focused on specific topics in using data on vectors to fit trait data to mechanistic and statistical models and to fit population dynamics models to data taken from Vectorbyte‘s VecDyn database. The training materials are posted on GitHub.

The working group meetings started off with brief presentations from working group leaders to discuss plans and give an overview of the working group’s interests. Thursday and Friday were then spent hashing out ideas and in some cases, outlining papers to write or experiments to do with group members.

Working group topics included modeling how life history trade-offs in vector traits may impact transmission of vector-borne disease, creating a framework to understand how behavioral manipulation of vectors may similarly impact transmission, characterizing when and where rate summation breaks down for predicting thermal performance curves for different vector traits, discussion of tick questing behavior, whether we can use body size or other traits to create integral projection models for vector populations, and individual-based models for vector populations.

Two days go by fast, especially when we only get to meet once per year! The discussions were stimulating, groups outlined concrete goals and plans for how to complete tasks between now and next year, and we still made time for some walks or runs along the beach and drinks at the Asilomar pub. Here’s to another great #Vbite meeting!