KWAME NKRUMAH UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES

FACULTY OF RENEWABLE NATURAL RESOURCES

BSc. (Nat.Res. Mgt) Assignment (Ecology)

NAME: BOATENG EDWARD

INDEX NUMBER: 3829618

Year Two

Convid-19 has adversely affected organisms including organisms in the terrestrial,aquatic and arboreal
habitats. Currently, the greatest threat to animals in the Ecology is Convid-19 and is causing widespread
direct and indirect effects to animals and their habitats. In Asia, Europe, America, Africa and the rest of
the world and is severe. Future threats will occur as underdeveloped countries that have minimal
controls industrialize of particular concern are those areas, such as remote areas which have less
technology to battle the disease.

Convid-19 is infectious disease and increasing, causing losses in both human and animal lives, as well as
large cost to society.Convid-19 is contributing to diseases emergence, and has effect on population
density in the ecology taking into consideration birthrate, death rate, migration etc.

Population density and urbanization – Corona virus spread more quickly among people who live in close
proximity to each other. Currently, over 50% of the global population lives in urban areas. With more
people living in dense conditions, there is more frequent contact between more individuals, allowing
disease transmission to easily occur.

Migration and global travel – As it becomes more common for people to travel throughout the world, it
also becomes easier for diseases to travel with them. An outbreak in one region that would have
otherwise been contained has move into other uninfected regions when infected people travel or
relocate to these areas.

Environmental degradation – Environmental challenges such as changing climate, can lead to the
spreading of diseases, it is vector-borne (or carried by a host) and can stay in air for hours. And the
corona virus is spread by having contact with an infected organism. As the climate changes, the disease
carrying host are able to move into regions where they previously could not survive, thus affecting new
areas. Additionally, as global temperatures increase, so do the conditions under which many of these
carriers flourish.

Convid-19 is an infectious disease that affects about 3 million people which has killed millions of people.
These disease is most widespread in Asia and other developed areas of the world.These also affect
people around the world, but the technology to treat and care for these diseases lies in the more
developed countries of the world.

Disease affects the demographic characteristics of populations, such as the infant mortality rate, crude
birth and death rates, the total fertility rate, the rate of natural increase, the life expectancy and the rate
of population growth. It also affects what stage of the DTM that a country falls under.Countries without
access to healthcare or knowledge of diseases and how they spread are the ones that are effected the
most. This is why Convid-19 is most widespread in the world as many of the countries do not have
governments that support the rights, health or access to knowledge for the people.

Corona virus was discovered in China in the December 2019, and the worldwide diffusion of it began
shortly thereafter which lead to lockdown of many coutries. So many companies brokedown and caused
shortage of many essential goods leading to increase in prices of commodities too. It reduced the rate of
migration but at it early stage it increased migration since many travelled from one place to another due
to fear of contracting the disease and as result many contracted the disease and sent it to their safe
villages making it unsafe anymore and this places are less developed with technology and other health
care facilities.

These diseases affect middle-aged and aging populations with higher life expectancies. It emerges
disease like Heart disease, cancer, strokes, pneumonia, diabetes, and liver diseases are the diseases that
effect people in modern times. Unlike infectious diseases, these tend to be spread across the globe and
do not affect only the less developed countries.Contact rates tend to increase with density but saturate
at higher density.

Contact rates and patterns among individuals in a geographic area drive transmission of directly-
transmitted pathogens, making it essential to understand and estimate contacts for simulation of disease
dynamics. Under the uniform mixing assumption, one of two mechanisms is typically used to describe
the relation between contact rate and population density: density-dependent or frequency-dependent.
Based on existing evidence of population threshold and human mobility patterns, we formulated a
spatial contact model to describe the appropriate form of transmission with initial growth at low density
and saturation at higher density. We show that the two mechanisms are extreme cases that do not
capture real population movement across all scales. Empirical data of human and wildlife diseases
indicate that a nonlinear function may work better when looking at the full spectrum of densities. This
estimation can be applied to large areas with population mixing in general activities. For crowds with
unusually large densities (e.g., transportation terminals, stadiums, or mass gatherings), the lack of
organized social contact structure deviates the physical contacts towards a special case of the spatial
contact model – the dynamics of kinetic gas molecule collision. In this case, an ideal gas model with van
der Waals correction fits well; existing movement observation data and the contact rate between
individuals is estimated using kinetic theory. A complete picture of contact rate scaling with population
density may help clarify the definition of transmission rates in heterogeneous, large-scale spatial
systems.

Considering organisms in the aquatic environment birt rate has increased rapidly and migration has also
increased, death rate is quite low since people do not gather to work.

For directly transmitted diseases, contact patterns drive the spread of infectious pathogens in both space
and time. Recent data-driven, detailed, large-scale spatial models and contact experiments have
improved our understanding of contact networks in different social settings, as well as the corresponding
spread patterns of infectious diseases. However, the generalized scaling rules of host contact patterns
over population size or density still need refinement. In epidemic models targeting a large
heterogeneous area, it becomes important to set the appropriate transmission rates to different local
populations.At the other end of the density spectrum, if a location has extremely high densities in a local
area (for example in transportation terminals, stadiums, or mass gatherings), it might pose high risks that
may facilitate disease spread, and recently a research agenda has been proposed to explore the role of
mathematical modeling in assessing health risks associated with mass gatherings. However, in such
settings, the contact rates between individuals remain unexplored and it is unclear whether a scaling
mechanism relationship exists between transmission rates and population density. If a spatial epidemic
model needs to include such locations and quantitatively assess the risk of disease outbreak, it might not
be appropriate to extrapolate the rules under general mixing to crowds. In this case, people have very
low mean free path and do not have the ability to contact everyone else. Understanding the contact
patterns in the extremely high density range is important, and appropriate scaling of contacts and
transmissibility needs to be applied.

Here, we aim to use a spatial contact model with constant population density and limited activity range
to estimate contact rates. Within a local population, individuals move around and contact with each
other randomly, and a spatial dispersal kernel controls the decay behavior of contact rate. Since the
decay usually depends on both density and activity range, a dispersal kernel function φρr belonging to
exponential power distribution family is selected in order to calculate the contact rate within the activity
range.