ABSTRACT: Sea lice are one of the most economically costly and ecologically concerning problems facing the salmon farming industry. Here, we validated a coupled biological and physical model that simulated sea lice larvae dispersal from salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago (BA), British Columbia, Canada. We employed a concept from ecological agent-based modeling known as ‘pattern matching’, which identifies similar emergent properties in both the simulated and observed data to confirm that the simulation contained sufficient complexity to recreate the emergent properties of the system. One emergent property from the biophysical simulations was the existence of sub-networks of farms. These were also identified in the observed sea lice count data in this study using a space-time scan statistic (SaTScan) to identify significant spatio-temporal clusters of farms. Despite finding support for our simulation in the observed data, which consisted of over a decade’s worth of monthly sea lice abundance counts from salmon farms in the BA, the validation was not entirely straightforward. The complexities associated with validating this biophysical dispersal simulation highlight the need to further develop validation techniques for agent-based models in general, and biophysical simulations in particular, which often result in patchiness in their dispersal fields. The methods utilised in this validation could be adopted as a template for other epidemiological dispersal models, particularly those related to aquaculture, which typically have robust disease monitoring data collection plans in place.

中文翻译：

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海虱传播模型的验证：基于生态因子的模型应用于水生流行病学的原理

摘要：海虱是鲑鱼养殖业面临的最经济，最经济，最生态的问题之一。在这里，我们验证了一个耦合的生物和物理模型，该模型模拟了加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省布劳顿群岛（BA）鲑鱼养殖场中海虱幼虫的扩散情况。我们采用了来自基于生态主体的模型的概念，即“模式匹配”，该概念可在模拟数据和观察到的数据中识别相似的紧急属性，以确认模拟包含足够的复杂性来重新创建系统的紧急属性。生物物理模拟的一个新兴特性是农场的子网网络的存在。在这项研究中，使用时空扫描统计数据（SaTScan）观察海虱计数数据，也可以识别出这些特征，以识别重要的时空集群。尽管在观察到的数据中找到了支持我们模拟的支持，该数据包括来自BA鲑鱼养殖场的十多年来每月的海虱丰度计数，但验证并非完全简单。与验证此生物物理分散模拟相关的复杂性凸显了通常需要进一步开发针对基于代理的模型（尤其是生物物理模拟）的验证技术，这通常会导致其分散领域中出现斑驳。该验证中使用的方法可以用作其他流行病学传播模型（尤其是与水产养殖有关的模型）的模板