Land-use change is rapidly converting forests and savannas into
‘anthro-habitat’: land whose primary focus is the production of
agriculture, shopping or sports facilities, or housing estates;
all of which provide some direct benefit to the human economy.
But how do these changes modify habitats in ways that change the
probability of infectious disease outbreaks? Habitat conversion
significantly alters the interactions between the environment
and populations of humans and domestic livestock. The resulting
changes in the infection dynamics of many vector- and water-
borne disease systems could create new opportunities for
pathogen infections, or could modify the dynamics towards
pathogen reduction or eradication. In this working group we
undertake a series of synthetic examinations that bring together
geographical data on land-use change with data on disease and
vector distributions and host abundance in order to develop
mathematical and heuristic models of disease risk. The goal is
to understand the impact of l