The closing workshop of the avian influenza Modelling Challenge was held on 24–27 August 2026 in Nantes, France, as part of the ModAH conference — an international scientific meeting dedicated to modelling in animal health. Most of the participating teams took part.
From the very beginning, the challenge generated unprecedented interest. Independent teams were asked to investigate and provide decision intelligence for a simulated HPAI epidemic unfolding across Jolly Island, a synthetic landscape of roughly 9,000 poultry farms. During its active phase, from February to April 2026, epidemic data was released to teams in three phases over three months, and at each stage, spanning every time zone around the globe, teams built modelling pipelines to analyse outbreak dynamics, forecast how the epidemic would develop, identify the determinants of disease spread, and assess the impact of counterfactual management scenarios.
45 teams from five continents registered for the Challenge, with 26 completing at least one phase and 21 seeing it through all three. Participants came from backgrounds in epidemiology, statistics, mathematics, data science, economics, wildlife ecology and AI engineering, and the tools they built were just as varied. Altogether, 177 participants contributed more than 6,000 person-hours, with a median of about 72 hours per team per phase. Effort held steady from phase to phase rather than tapering off, suggesting teams were continually refining and rethinking their models rather than simply re-running them.
Over two half-day sessions at the closing workshop, we had the opportunity to discover and compare the different modelling approaches developed by the teams, explore the performance of multi-model predictions, reflect on lessons for both participating in and organising modelling challenges, discuss future needs for modelling challenges in animal health, and, perhaps most importantly, get to know each other better and foster new collaborations between modelling groups.
A huge thank you to all the participating teams for their enthusiasm, creativity and commitment throughout this challenging exercise. And huge congratulations to all organisers Timothée Vergne, Clara Delecroix, Sébastien Lambert, Gaël Beaunée and Brandon Hayes for making this Challenge a reality.
The main takeaway is that there is real interest in this kind of collaborative exercise in animal health, and plenty of room for all teams to continue to develop their real-time response capabilities.
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