Tsetse Plan 2

The planning of cost-effective campaigns against tsetse can be assisted by predicting the impact of various types, intensities, and locations of control measures in and near the areas to be protected from the fly. Tsetse Plan 2 (TP2) is a simulation programme to predict the outcomes of different control operations, used separately or together in various spatial and temporal arrangements. The operations include the use of insecticide-treated cattle, artificial baits and aerial spraying of non-residual insecticides. Assessments are also made for the effects that tsetse control has on the risks of tsetse-borne diseases. Special efforts are made to ensure that TP2 is user-friendly, with copious notes and suggestions on how to operate it, understand and inspect its calculations, and to save and access its input and output data in scenario files.

The outputs of main interest are the predictions for the time course of control and its eventual end point in various parts of the operational areas. However, the reliability of such outputs depends on having realistic maps of the abundance, distribution, and population dynamics of tsetse before any control begins. Often, we have sampling data to allow us to infer how many flies occur in at least some of the places to be controlled, but we are usually unsure of how such data depend on ecological matters affecting the births, deaths and mobility of the flies throughout the whole area of concern. Hence, TP2 devotes much attention to quantifying the basic factors that can explain such sampling data as are available for the pretreatment situation. That attention is useful in its own right because it helps to confirm what we already know about the population dynamics of tsetse and it suggests what more we need to know.

Tsetse Plan 2 can be downloaded here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/tsetse-plan-2/

Read more about the development of Tsetse Plan 2 and its use to simulate the use of Tiny Targets to control G. fuscipes fuscipes in north west Uganda here : https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.09.552570v1.full.pdf