Infectious diseases are not distributed at random; in fact, some environmental factors may explain disease occurrence in time and space. Early stages of epidemiology attempted to understand disease occurrence linking disease cases (e.g., human cholera) with environmental features (e.g., a street-pump) in a spatial perspective, showing that understanding and anticipating the “where” of an outbreak may be a valuable tool for effective public health interventions. Infectious diseases are, by definition, the complex association between at least two organisms (i.e., pathogen and host) with their surrounding environment. Ecological niche modeling is used in ecology to environmentally characterize and anticipate the species’ occurrence inside or outside the known range; thus, in epidemiology this approach can help to understand endemics and epidemics. Identifying the environmental factors allowing (or not) the presence of pathogens, vectors, or reservoirs in a disease system, elucidates the ecology and geography of an infectious disease.
Results/Conclusions
We present NicheA, software developed to estimate ecological niches following the Hutchinsonian approach of an n-multidimensional space occupied by species including those of public health importance. Ecological niche models of pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs are generated, analyzed, and visualized in a virtual environmental space, and then projected to the geographic space in the form of continuous or binary distribution models. NicheA is implemented in a user-friendly platform and could be considered as a next-generation tool in niche modeling and disease mapping. The installation files, online manual, and user support are freely available at http://nichea.sourceforge.net