Controlling disease outbreaks in wildlife using limited culling: modelling classical swine fever incursions in wild pigs in Australia

Wildlife infectious disease can have enormous ecological, biodiversity and societal impacts [1-4]. However, management responses required for mitigation are frequently limited by poor understanding of wildlife disease epidemiology.Disease modelling is one approach for providing new insights into wildlife disease epidemiology and has allowed important conceptual advances in wildlife disease management [5]. Mathematical modelling was an early method used (and is still widely applied) [6-9]. However, application of this method has often been simplistic, not incorporating many of the major ecological factors that affect disease epidemiology [10]. Furthermore, one of the key concepts in mathematical models - the existence of a threshold level of host abundance required for invasion or persistence of infection - originated in human health and is poorly supported by evidence from wildlife disease studies [11].With the improvement of information technology, process models (or simulation models) have been advocated by some as a method of more realistically representing the complexity of real world animal health problems [12,13]. Process models can capture great complexity, thus enhancing our ability to model complex situations. These models have been widely applied in animal health generally, but relatively less commonly in wildlife disease epidemiology, with some exceptions [14-19].To take advantage of the great complexity that process models can incorporate, a good understanding of the "process" (host-infection interaction) is required. Sus scrofa, commonly known as wild boar, feral pig, wild hog and wild pig (herein referred to as wild pig) is an important international wildlife species found on every continent except Antarctica [20]. Considerable research has been conducted internationally on wild pig ecology [21-25], and this research can be harnessed to construct detailed process models to study disease epidemiology in this species. Wild pigs have been involved in the