IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 737: Using Landscape Analysis to Test Hypotheses about Drivers of Tick Abundance and Infection Prevalence with Borrelia burgdorferi

IJERPH, Vol. 15, Pages 737: Using Landscape Analysis to Test Hypotheses about Drivers of Tick Abundance and Infection Prevalence with Borrelia burgdorferi International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health doi: 10.3390/ijerph15040737 Authors: A. Ferrell R. Brinkerhoff Patterns of vector-borne disease risk are changing globally in space and time and elevated disease risk of vector-borne infection can be driven by anthropogenic modification of the environment. Incidence of Lyme disease, caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto, has risen in a number of locations in North America and this increase may be driven by spatially or numerically expanding populations of the primary tick vector, Ixodes scapularis. We used a model selection approach to identify habitat fragmentation and land-use/land cover variables to test the hypothesis that the amount and configuration of forest cover at spatial scales relevant to deer, the primary hosts of adult ticks, would be the predominant determinants of tick abundance. We expected that land cover heterogeneity and amount of forest edge, a habitat thought to facilitate deer foraging and survival, would be the strongest driver of tick density and that larger spatial scales (5–10 km) would be more important than smaller scales (1 km). We generated metrics of deciduous and mixed forest fragmentation using Fragstats 4.4 implemented in ArcMap 10.3 and found, after adjusting for multicollinearity, that tota...
Source: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Article Source Type: research