A spatially-heterogeneous impact of fencing on the African swine fever wavefront in the Korean wild boar population.

Abstract

In October 2019, South Korea's first case of African swine fever (ASF) was reported in wild boar in the north of the country. Despite the implementation of a 2300 km-long fencing strategy, the ASF wavefront continued to invade southward. Our study aimed to investigate the ASF wavefront dynamics in different regions of South Korea, as well as to assess the effectiveness of the fencing measures on ASF dispersal and wavefront velocity. From the nationwide wild boar surveillance system, we extracted 2661 cases, starting from 2 October 2019 (first detection) to 15 September 2022. The cases were categorised into four main spatiotemporal clusters. The average wavefront velocity over the four clusters was estimated at 0.52 km/week, with the cluster in the eastern part of the Korean peninsula exhibiting the fastest velocity (0.99 km/week) compared to the other clusters (0.44, 0.31, and 0.15 km/week). We hypothesise that these differences are related to different wild boar densities due to heterogeneous habitat suitability. We also found that fencing significantly impacted ASF dispersal in only two of the four main clusters, with no evidence that fencing slowed down the spread of the wavefront in any of the clusters. We argue that this heterogeneity might result from fencing locations being misaligned with the true (and unobserved) wavefront.