Defining an epidemiological landscape by connecting host movement to
pathogen transmission
Abstract
Environment drives the host movements that shape pathogen transmission
through three mediating processes: host density, host mobility, and
contact. These processes combine with pathogen life-history to give rise
to an “epidemiological landscape” that determines spatial patterns of
pathogen transmission. Yet despite its central role in transmission,
strategies for predicting the epidemiological landscape from real-world
data remain limited. Here, we develop the epidemiological landscape as
an interface between movement ecology and spatial epidemiology. We
propose a movement-pathogen pace-of-life heuristic for prioritizing the
landscape’s central processes by positing that spatial dynamics for fast
pace-of-life pathogens are best-approximated by the spatial ecology of
host contacts; spatial dynamics for slower pace-of-life pathogens are
best approximated by host densities; and spatial dynamics for pathogens
with environmental reservoirs reflect a convolution of those densities
with the spatial configuration of environmental reservoir sites. We then
identify mechanisms that underpin the epidemiological landscape and
match each mechanism to emerging tools from movement ecology. Finally,
we outline workflows for describing the epidemiological landscape and
using it to predict subsequent patterns of pathogen transmission. Our
framework links transmission to environmental context, providing a
scaffold for mechanistically understanding how environmental context can
generate and shift existing patterns in spatial epidemiology.