Homeland Security directorate funds new web-based tools to prepare for livestock disease outbreaks

The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has two new tools at their disposal for predicting cattle shipments and preparing for disease outbreaks among them.

With department funding, the two new web-based tools include the U.S. Animal Movement Model (USAMM)-Shiny App and the CADENCE What-If Tool.

The former is the first national-scale model of livestock compressed into an interactive web application. Through heat mapping, it tracks the movement of cattle across the country, including how many, where they are going to and coming from, and even the level of uncertainty in the assessment. Plans are also underway to see it expanded to include other animal shipments.

“The detailed pattern of cattle shipments across the U.S. is not very easy to observe, but is important for understanding the potential for disease spread,” Colleen Webb, the USAMM-Shiny App developer and a biologist at Colorado State University, said. “We see different facets of U.S. cattle shipment patterns in different data sets, but these different data streams need to be combined in order to get the whole picture…The USAMM-Shiny App allows users to visualize more detailed cattle shipment predictions than have previously been available.”

As for the CADENCE tool, users can view disease outbreak simulations across eight scenarios in the United States. They can adjust for disease type, spread and infection before digesting a summary of the disease’s duration, depopulation effects, and the number of recommended farm vaccinations.

“Simulation modeling is often used to plan for disease outbreaks,” Shrideep Pallickara, the CADENCE What-If tool developer and a computer scientist at Colorado State University, said. “The expressiveness of simulations generally comes at a price – timeliness.”

It takes what used to take hours or even days, and compresses them into less than a second of computing.

Both cases are important to ongoing agricultural defense preparations by the government, given that the United States is the world’s largest producer of beef. The projects are also ongoing. Pallickara, for example, intends to work with experts at Kansas State University to move CADENCE into single and multiplayer gaming environments, which would, in turn, allow testing of multiple outbreak scenarios in real time.