Urbanization and disease transmission

Background/Question/Methods

Anthropogenic land use has enormous effects on the structure and function of biological systems.  In the eastern U.S. the most dominant effect of human land use over the past 50 years is urbanization - the conversion of forest into residential and urban areas.  We studied the impact of urbanization on mosquito, tick, and bird communities and on transmission of West Nile virus and Lyme disease. 

Results/Conclusions

            These diseases show starkly different patterns across a forest to city urbanization gradient, with one pathogen increasing sharply with urbanization and the other decreasing.  The pattern is so extreme that the pathogens are completely absent from opposite ends of the gradient.  I will discuss the ecological factors that drive these differences in transmission and discuss what data we need and to what extent we can predict a priori how urbanization will affect transmission of a given pathogen.