A document by Chao Gao. Click on the document to view its contents.

1. Opisthorchis viverrini is a water-based disease-causing parasite whose public health implications are relevant in particular in Southeast Asia despite broad control efforts and education campaigns. Untreated or chronic infections often lead to severe hepatobiliary morbidity including cholangiocarcinoma, an often lethal bile duct cancer. The liver fluke O. viverrini is the causative agent of opisthorchiasis, and can be contracted by consumption of raw fish, after which it settles in the small intrahepatic bile ducts. The life cycle involves, besides freshwater snails in which asexual reproduction takes place, freshwater cyprinid fishes (family Cyprinidae) as intermediate hosts. Piscivorous mammals, including humans, dogs and cats, act as definitive hosts. 2. Here, we propose a spatially explicit model for the transmission dynamics in realistic freshwater environments. Our model generalizes existing mathematical models, in particular by assimilating novel types of spreading mechanisms in space and time. We explore theoretically the range of outcomes that the proposed framework produces, and its basic sensitivity and stability analyses; 3. Our study emphasizes that hydrological connectivity is key to shaping patterns of disease spread. Fish distribution and mobility also affect disease inroads. Our study provides baseline information on the role of connected freshwater bodies and their suitability for intermediate and final hosts. The distributions of fish catch and fish market supplies are also considered because they affect the spatiotemporal spread of opisthorchiasis; 4. Adding a spatial resolution to transmission models changes fundamentally the epidemiological descriptions and the related scenarios of disease propagation and allows an improved description of the ecology of hosts, parasites, and their infection cycles. 5. The improvement that the work provides is a much more realistic description of the environment where infection cycles develop and spread, reflected in the inclusion of relevant, hitherto neglected, epidemiological factors.

A proper understanding of sediment transport dynamics, critically including resuspension and deposition processes of suspended sediments, is key to the morphodynamics of shallow tidal environments. Aiming to account for deposition mechanics in a synthetic theoretical framework introduced to model erosion dynamics, here we investigated suspended sediment dynamics. A complete spatial and temporal coverage of suspended sediment concentration (SSC) required to effectively characterize resuspension events is hardly available through observation alone, even combining point measurements and satellite images, but it can be retrieved by properly calibrated and tested numerical models. We analyzed one-year-long time series of SSC computed by a bi-dimensional, finite-element model in six historical configurations of the Venice Lagoon in the last four centuries. Following the peak-over-threshold theory, we statistically characterized suspended sediment dynamics by analyzing interarrival times, intensities and durations of over-threshold SSC events. Our results confirm that, as for erosion events, SSC can be modeled as a marked Poisson process in the intertidal flats for all the considered historical configurations of the Venice Lagoon because exponentially distributed random variables well describe interarrival times, intensity and duration of over-threshold events. Moreover, interarrival times, intensity and duration describing local erosion and over-threshold SSC events are highly related, although not identical because of the non-local dynamics of suspended sediment transport related to advection and dispersion processes. Owing to this statistical characterization of SSC events, it is possible to generate synthetic, yet realistic, time series of SSC for the long-term modeling of shallow tidal environments.

Wave-induced bottom shear stress is one of the leading processes that control sediment erosion dynamics in shallow tidal environments, because it is responsible for sediment resuspension and, jointly with tidal currents, for sediment reworking on tidal flats. Reliable descriptions of erosion events are foundational to effective frameworks relevant to the fate of tidal landscape evolution. However, the absence of long-term, measured time series of bottom shear stress (BSS) prevents a direct analysis of erosion dynamics. Here we adopted a fully-coupled, bi-dimensional numerical model to compute BSS generated by both tidal currents and wind waves in six historical configurations of the Venice Lagoon in the last four centuries. The one-year-long time series of the total BSS were analyzed based on the peak-over-threshold theory to statistically characterize events that exceed a given erosion threshold and investigate the effects of morphological modifications on spatial and temporal erosion patterns. Our analysis suggests that erosion events can be modeled as a marked Poisson process in the intertidal flats for all the considered configurations of the Venice Lagoon, because interarrival times, durations and intensities of the over-threshold exceedances are well described by exponentially distributed random variables. Moreover, while the intensity and duration of over-threshold events are temporally correlated, almost no correlation exists between them and interarrival times. The resulting statistical characterization allows for a straightforward computation of morphological indicators, such as erosion work, and paves the way to a novel synthetic, yet reliable, approach for long-term morphodynamic modeling of tidal environments.