Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2006 Dec;12(12):1822-6.
doi: 10.3201/eid1212.060373.

Ecologic niche modeling and spatial patterns of disease transmission

A Townsend Peterson  1
Affiliations
Review

Ecologic niche modeling and spatial patterns of disease transmission

A Townsend Peterson. Emerg Infect Dis. 2006 Dec.

Abstract

Ecologic niche modeling (ENM) is a growing field with many potential applications to questions regarding the geography and ecology of disease transmission. Specifically, ENM has the potential to inform investigations concerned with the geography, or potential geography, of vectors, hosts, pathogens, or human cases, and it can achieve fine spatial resolution without the loss of information inherent in many other techniques. Potential applications and current frontiers and challenges are reviewed.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure
Figure
Hypothetical example of a species’ known occurrences (circles) and inferences from that information. The middle panel shows the pattern that would result from a surface-fitting or smoothing algorithm, and the bottom panel shows the ability of ecologic niche modeling approaches to detect unknown patterns in biologic phenomena based on the relationship between known occurrences and spatial patterns in environmental parameters. GIS, geographic information system.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Waller LA, Carlin BP, Xia H, Gelfand AE. Hierarchical spatio-temporal mapping of disease rates. J Am Stat Assoc. 1997;92:607–17. 10.2307/2965708 - DOI
    1. Kleinschmidt I, Bagayoko M, Clarke GPY, Craig M, Le Sueur D. A spatial statistical approach to malaria mapping. Int J Epidemiol. 2000;29:355–61. 10.1093/ije/29.2.355 - DOI - PubMed
    1. MacNab YC, Dean CB. Autoregressive spatial smoothing and temporal spline smoothing for mapping rates. Biometrics. 2001;57:949–56. 10.1111/j.0006-341X.2001.00949.x - DOI - PubMed
    1. Grinnell J. Field tests of theories concerning distributional control. Am Nat. 1917;51:115–28. 10.1086/279591 - DOI
    1. Soberón J, Peterson AT. Interpretation of models of fundamental ecological niches and species' distributional areas. Biodiversity Informatics. 2005;2:1–10.

LinkOut - more resources