DISES-EX: Simulating social-ecological cascades during the second plague pandemic

Throughout history, infectious diseases have shaped human societies in profound ways. The Black Death pandemic of the 14th century was one of the deadliest in human history, killing an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. This project aims to unravel the complex relationships between climate, agriculture, human behavior, and disease outbreaks during the Black Death and subsequent centuries-long plague pandemic. By integrating mathematical models with archaeological and historical data, the researchers will reconstruct how environmental and social factors combined to create conditions ripe for catastrophic pandemics. Broader impacts will arise from the integrated datasets and modeling tools that will be made freely available and support infectious disease research. The crucial insights will aid management of modern outbreaks and may improve public health in the future. The project will develop computer simulations that integrate models of disease transmission, human demographics, land use, and climate. These models will be combined with diverse sources including human skeletal remains, tree-ring data, pollen records, and historical documents using a technique called data assimilation. This approach allows researchers to fill in gaps in the fragmentary historical record and test hypotheses about how factors like climate-driven food shortages, urbanization, and trade routes affected plague outbreaks. The researchers will collect new bio-archaeological data on age, health status, and migration patterns from skeletal remains at plague burial sites across Europe. By reconstructing the environmental and social conditions surrounding major outbreaks over several centuries, the project aims to identify recurring patterns that cannot be revealed from contemporary pandemics alone. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.