Synergistic Effects of Grassland Fragmentation and Temperature on Bovine Rabies Emergence
- PDF / 2,732,117 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 593.972 x 792 pts Page_size
- 81 Downloads / 172 Views
Ó 2020 EcoHealth Alliance
Original Contribution
Synergistic Effects of Grassland Fragmentation and Temperature on Bovine Rabies Emergence Germa´n Botto Nun˜ez ,1,2,3 Daniel J. Becker,4 Rick L. Lawrence,5 and Raina K. Plowright1 1
Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Bozeman Disease Ecology Lab, Montana State University, 109 Lewis Hall, Bozeman, MT 59717 Departamento de Me´todos Cuantitativos, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de la Repu´blica, Montevideo 11800, Uruguay 3 Programa para la Conservacio´n de los Murcie´lagos de Uruguay, Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, Montevideo 11000, Uruguay 4 Department of Biology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 5 Spatial Sciences Center, Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 2
Abstract: In 2007, common vampire bats were the source of the first outbreak of paralytic bovine rabies in Uruguay. The outbreak coincided in space and time with the fragmentation of native grasslands for monospecific forestry for wood and cellulose production. Using spatial analyses, we show that the increase in grassland fragmentation, together with the minimum temperature in the winter, accounts for the spatial pattern of outbreaks in the country. We propose that fragmentation may increase the connectivity of vampire bat colonies by promoting the sharing of feeding areas, while temperature modulates their home range plasticity. While a recent introduction of the virus from neighboring Brazil could have had an effect on outbreak occurrence, we show here that the distribution of rabies cases is unlikely to be explained by only an invasion process from Brazil. In accordance with previous modeling efforts, an increase in connectivity may promote spatial persistence of rabies virus within vampire bat populations. Our results suggest that land use planning might help to reduce grassland fragmentation and thus reduce risk of rabies transmission to livestock. This will be especially important in the context of climatic changes and increasing minimum temperatures in the winter. Keywords: Spatial autoregressive models, Geographically weighted regression, Desmodus rotundus, Minimum mean temperature, Spillover, Uruguay
INTRODUCTION
Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this article (https://doi. org/10.1007/s10393-020-01486-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Correspondence to: Germa´n Botto Nun˜ez, e-mail: [email protected]
AND
PURPOSE
The combination of landscape change and increasing anthropogenic food availability for wildlife may influence wildlife demographics, foraging behavior, and immune responses, affecting the spatial and temporal dynamics of infectious diseases (Gottdenker et al. 2014; Becker et al. 2015). Species’ behavioral responses to landscape change in particular may be bounded by their ability to adapt phys-
G. Botto Nun˜ez et al.
iologically to changing environmental conditions (Weiner 1992; Wong and Candolin 2015). In particular, low temperatu
Data Loading...
