Anthrax outbreaks are common in southwest Texas, but some years are worse than others. “You get an explosion of 10,000 animal cases, and then it fades out again,” says UF’s Jason Blackburn. He is collecting information about animal movement, vegetation growth, and other factors to search for patterns that may help predict the level of risk.
Blackburn is developing an AI-based model to process the resulting massive amounts of data. To train the model, Blackburn feeds it more than 20 years of data from satellite imagery showing how a landscape’s vegetation grows and dies back with each year’s changing seasons. The goal is to develop a way to determine the likelihood of an outbreak with two months’ notice.
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