Novel Methods in Disease Biogeography: A Case Study with Heterosporosis.

ABSTRACT: Disease biogeography is currently a promising field to complement epidemiology, and ecological niche modeling theory and methods are a key component. Therefore, applying the concepts and tools from ecological niche modeling to disease biogeography and epidemiology will provide biologically sound and analytically robust descriptive and predictive analyses of disease distributions. As a case study, we explored the ecologically important fish disease Heterosporosis, a relatively poorly understood disease caused by the intracellular microsporidian parasite Heterosporis sutherlandae. We explored two novel ecological niche modeling methods, the minimum-volume ellipsoid (MVE) and the Marble algorithm, which were used to reconstruct the fundamental and the realized ecological niche of H.

SUBMITTER: Escobar LE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5511963 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature