Modelling the Dynamics of a Facility for Understanding Critical Resource Use in Oiled Seabird Rehabilitation

Abstract

Abstract The rehabilitation of oiled birds in a large scale event can be a challenging undertaking, especially because of emergency dynamics which make it difficult to predict when, and how many animals will be arriving at a facility from day to day. Scenarios from past spill events demonstrate that even a small oil spill in a vulnerable area or season can produce hundreds of live oiled birds washing ashore, every day, for many days or weeks in a row. Any facility (permanent or temporary) or a network of facilities near the incident site would have difficulty to admit and process streams of hundreds of birds per day while continuing to try and guarantee mimumum care standards in every stage of the rehabilitation process. Guaranteeing these minimum standards during the whole of the response needs a thorough understanding of the many functional relationships between available resources (people, equipment, consumables, foods etc), the quality and size of the facility set-up, and the maximum number of animals that each department in the facility can treat per time unit, according to these standards. The mathematical model “Birds in Rehab (BiR version 1.0)” was developed between 2012 and 2015 as a simulation tool for facility managers to understand the dynamics of animals of one species (guillemot/murre) flowing through a facility according to realistic decision making of experts on the work floor. Recently, thanks to funds from the Netherlands authorities, the tool was updated (current version: BiR 2.2) in order to be able to simulate multiple species that are admitted to a facility. Different species need different resources, which have been included in the updated model. A new functionality is a calculator, which runs a given scenario in a few seconds, and allow the user to compare the results (survival, release of species) of alternative treatment strategies. This paper will describe the BiR 2.2 model and its applications. One of the useful features is that it provides quantitative overviews of how many animals are in care at any time, and in which phase of treatment they are. This allows a useful assessment of the feasibility of such numbers in relation to available resources, space, and other natural limits of the facility that is simulated. The model can help to explore the capacity limits of a given facility setup and see where bottlenecks may appear. The new version will be used for training and planning purposes, and is guaranteed to assist experts who are interested in deepening their insights in dynamic processes on the work floor of a facility that are impossible to exercise and in reality hard to unravel.