Systematic review of modeling assumptions and empirical evidence: does parasite transmission increase nonlinearly with host density?

For the paper entitled, “Systematic review of modeling assumptions and empirical evidence: does parasite transmission increase nonlinearly with host density?”, currently in review in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, we systematically reviewed seven representative ecology journals for host–parasite models that contain transmission functions, yielding 262 relevant papers. We analyzed each paper to determine whether each study used a single transmission function – the DD transmission function, the FD transmission function, or a single nonlinear transmission function – or whether the paper qualitatively or quantitatively evaluated multiple transmission functions. We also recorded whether authors worked with host numbers, densities, or frequencies, whether and how area was explicitly included within models, and whether area and/or host density were constants. All of these data are included in a single dataset in this repository. Additionally, we performed an extensive literature review to find experimental or observational studies that compared transmission functions in animal systems. For each of the 42 resulting papers, we determined which transmission functions were evaluated and which function the authors determined to be the most parsimonious description (best fit balanced against number of parameters) of the given host-parasite system. These data are included in a single dataset within this repository. The paper in review also includes a substantial model simulation component, which can be found in a different GitHub repository and as the R package ‘contactr’.