On Thursday October 27th, Sadie Ryan gave a NRM in Africa talk titled, “Implications of Climate Change for Zoonotic Disease Risk in Africa.” Dr. Sadie Ryan is Assistant Professor of Medical Geography in the Geography Department, as well as the Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI), at the University of Florida. The talk focused on Ryan’s research on buffalo and natural resource management in Kruger National Park and Klaserie Nature Reserve, in South Africa, over the past 16 years.Dr. Ryan’s research is multi-faceted, having completed comprehensive research on a number of factors affecting buffalo in southern Africa. The overall theme, however, is the study of phenological synchrony (in lay person’s terms: the ways in which a species matches the timing of their functions with other species and/or their environment) of buffalo and their environments, and how climate change threatens to disrupt that. Ryan primarily presented on projects using massive datasets which analyze buffalo in terms of home range, habitat selection, and birth timing/breeding phenology.
In the sub-tropical yet very seasonal landscapes of these parks, tracking where the buffalo travel (their ranges) is important for specifying animals’ needs and whether different herds’ ranges are distinct from one another (which is itself important for measuring disease transaction vulnerabilities). Similarly, tracking animals’ levels of fecal phosphorous and fecal nitrogen provides information about their grazing habits and whether or not the landscape in the parks are able to fully support the buffalos’ dietary needs. As Ryan found out, the metabolic minimum for the buffalo was not met 100% of the time within the parks. Further, in studying buffalos’ birth timing, via a database of 786 recorded births over 8 years, Ryan’s research suggests that pregnant buffalo may generally be very resource constrained and are timing births according to resource availability, and particularly the green-up season. As climate change threatens to affect a number of these resources and processes, the basic biological functions and well-beings of these animals are likely to be significantly affected.