Professor Louisiana State University, Louisiana, United States
Abstract Submission: Vibrio vulnificus (Vv) is a naturally occurring bacterium that is ubiquitous in coastal recreational and oyster growing waters and can cause life-threatening infections to exposed humans. Yet, little is known about when and where it might occur and what environmental conditions make it abundant. This paper presents new insights into environmental conditions favoring Vv abundance by creating a new XGBoost-based model that is capable to forecast when and where Vv abundance might occur. It was discovered that Vv abundance exhibits a long-range dependence on antecedent environmental conditions that can be characterized with 7 independent environmental predictors including water temperature, water level, salinity, pH, wind speed, chlorophyll, and solar radiation. The long-range dependence of Vv may extend over 110 days particularly on water level and salinity. While temperature and salinity are generally recognized as the two most important environmental predictors for Vv, this study found that water level is a more important predictor for Vv than salinity. It was also discovered that water level alone may explain 68-70% of variations in observed Vv concentration. Other predictors, including pH, solar radiation, salinity, temperature, chlorophyll, and wind, may explain 66-67%, 64-66%, 53-57%, 46-48%, 40-47%, and 44% of variations in Vv concentration, respectively. The XGBoost-based model, built with the seven environmental predictors along with their time lags as input variables, is capable to explain 90% of variations in observed Vv concentration, greatly enhancing our ability to forecast the potential risk of vibrio infection and to intervene to reduce the risk to public health.
.jpg "Zhiqiang Deng, ENV SP photo")
