Shaping zoonoses risk using landscape ecology and landscape attractiveness for people, two case studies in Europe

Landscape, including land use and land cover composition and structure, are recognized as important drivers for vector-borne disease risk. Since vector-borne pathogens rely on at least one vector and one host species, the occurrence of a disease is linked to areas where habitats of these species overlap functionally. The fact that these areas do not necessarily coincide with specific vegetation types hampers the correct identification of areas at risk. In this paper, we explore the potential of a resource-based habitat concept (RBHC) in identifying ‘suitable habitats’ for vector-borne pathogens. The resource-based habitat concept has been much used in conservation ecology, but has not been used yet in disease ecology. This concept would offer a framework to systematically study the different resources that are necessary for the completion of the transmission cycle, and link these resources to landscape features and other environmental factors. We show that the RBHC can be adapted to the multi-species setting of a vector-borne pathogen and illustrate this by applying the concept to bluetongue, a midge-transmitted virus in ruminants. We discuss the usefulness of the concept for vector-borne diseases and we argue that the concept may enable us to study the functional habitats of all the relevant species (vectors as well as hosts), which will give new insight in the spatial and temporal variation in transmission opportunities and the resulting disease risk. Also, it may facilitate communication between modellers and entomologists, help in identifying knowledge gaps and data gaps. Our framework may help act as a bridge between existing bottom-up mechanistic modelling approaches, that do not include landscape factors at all, and top-down satellite image-based approaches that are based on statistical inferences only