Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)

Abstract: Small and large scale pandemics are a natural phenomenon repeatably appearing throughout history, causing ecological and biological shifts in ecosystems and a wide range of their habitats. These pandemics usually start with a single strain but shortly become multi-strain due to a mutation process of the pathogen causing the epidemic. In this study, we propose a novel eco-epidemiological model that captures multi-species prey-predator dynamics with a multi-strain pandemic. The proposed model extends and combines the Lotka-Volterra prey-predator model and the Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered (SIR) epidemiological model. We investigate the ecosystem's sensitivity and stability during such a multi-strain pandemic through extensive simulation relying on both synthetic cases as well as two real-world configurations. Our results are aligned with known ecological and epidemiological findings, thus supporting the adequacy of the proposed model in realistically capturing the complex eco-epidemiological properties of the multi-species multi-strain pandemic dynamics.