Abstract

Most infectious diseases in animals are not distributed randomly. Instead, diseases in livestock and wildlife are predictable in terms of the geography, time, and species affected. Ecological niche modeling approaches have been crucial to the advancement of our understanding of diversity and diseases distributions. This contribution is an introductory overview to the field of distributional ecology, with emphasis on its application for spatial epidemiology. A new, revised modeling framework is proposed for more detailed and replicable models that account for both the biology of the disease to be modeled and the uncertainty of the data available. Considering that most disease systems need at least two organisms interacting (i.e., host and pathogen), biotic interactions lie at the core of the pathogen's ecological niche. As a result, neglecting interacting organisms in pathogen dynamics (e.g., maintenance, reproduction, and transmission) may limit efforts to forecast disease distributions in veterinary epidemiology. Although limitations of ecological niche modeling are noted, it is clear that the application and value of ecological niche modeling to epidemiology will increase in the future. Potential research lines include the examination of the effects of biotic variables on model performance, assessments of protocols for model calibration in disease systems, and new tools and metrics for robust model evaluation. Epidemiologists aiming to employ ecological niche modeling theory and methods to reconstruct and forecast epidemics should familiarize themselves with ecological literature and must consider multidisciplinary collaborations including veterinarians to develop biologically sound, statistically robust analyses. This review attempts to increase the use of tools from ecology in disease mapping.

Highlights

  • Spatial epidemiology is the branch of epidemiology that aims to understand the geographic distribution of diseases [1, 2]

  • Spatial epidemiology of animal diseases seems to be dominated by local-level studies [37]

  • Given the complexity of these interactions, traditional single-species ecological niche modeling approaches could fail to predict disease distributions and transmission risk accurately and protocols need to be revised with caution

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Summary

Introduction

Spatial epidemiology is the branch of epidemiology that aims to understand the geographic distribution of diseases (including its causative agents, hosts, and related factors) [1, 2]. The final goal of ecological niche modeling applications in spatial epidemiology is to determine environmental conditions associated with disease occurrence. “ingredients” to build ecological niche models have been summarized in three major categories: occurrence data, environmental data (abiotic or biotic variables), and algorithm (Figure 6).

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