Assessing the impact of climate change on the spatio-temporal distribution of foot-and-mouth disease risk for elephants

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Elephants are the largest extant terrestrial animals and are important for maintaining regional ecosystem balance and community diversity. However, poaching, population growth, habitat fragmentation, and viruses are major threats to global elephant populations. Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is one of the major threats to the health of elephants. Global warming has a serious impact on wildlife and accelerates the spread of viruses. In this study, the effects of climate change on the risk of disease in elephants were evaluated based on 1833 sites with reported FMD cases. Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) was used to model the current and future geographic distributions of FMD and to assess the risk of FMD in elephants under climate change. The results showed that the average annual temperature and annual precipitation were higher in elephant habitats than in the range of the FMD virus. The mean temperature in the driest quarter, temperature seasonality, annual mean temperature, and precipitation in the driest month had relatively large contributions to the risk of FMD, with a cumulative contribution rate of 82.8%. Both Asian elephants and African elephants had high overlap with the FMD virus with respect to altitude, annual mean temperature, and annual precipitation. An overall high risk of disease was detected at a certain band, mainly concentrated from 10°N to 50°N in the northern hemisphere and from 10°S to 35°S in the southern hemisphere. The risk of FMD was higher for the Asian elephant than the African elephant. The FMD risk increased gradually from the southeast to northwest in habitats of the Asian elephant, and presented a pattern of high north–south risk and low intermediate risk in the habitats of the African elephant. The area proportions of high risk, medium risk, and low risk in the distribution of both the Asian elephant and African elephant were all higher than the proportions of all risk types worldwide. Under global warming, the FMD risk was not expected to change significantly in most of the habitat areas of the Asian elephant or the African elephant in the 2050s and 2070s. Moreover, the areas and proportions of high risk, medium risk, and low risk were likely to change slightly. These results could benefit the conservation of elephants and provide relevant data for the prevention of FMD in high-risk areas under climate change.