A Temporal Network Model for Livestock Trade Systems.

The movements of animals between farms and other livestock holdings for trading activities form a complex livestock trade network. These movements play an important role in the spread of infectious diseases among premises. For studying the disease spreading among animal holdings, it is of great importance to understand the structure and dynamics of the trade system. In this paper, we propose a temporal network model for animal trade systems. Furthermore, a novel measure of node centrality important for disease spreading is introduced. The experimental results show that the model can reasonably well describe these spreading-related properties of the network and it can generate crucial data for research in the field of the livestock trade system.

Corrigendum: Hierarchical Structures in Livestock Trade Networks-A Stochastic Block Model of the German Cattle Trade Network.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2020.00281.].

Hierarchical Structures in Livestock Trade Networks-A Stochastic Block Model of the German Cattle Trade Network.

Trade of cattle between farms forms a complex trade network. We investigate partitions of this network for cattle trade in Germany. These partitions are groups of farms with similar properties and they are inferred directly from the trade pattern between farms. We make use of a rather new method known as stochastic block modeling (SBM) in order to divide the network into smaller units. SBM turns out to outperform the more established community detection method in the context of disease control in terms of trade restriction. Moreover, SBM is also superior to geographical based trade restrictions and could be a promising approach for disease control.