Session Information
| Session | Poster Session | | Date | Monday (2008-04-07) | | Time | 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM | | Room | Grand Terrace |
Presentation Information
| Presenter | Sarah Olson | | Title | Determining landscape-scale Lyme disease risk patterns in the Mid Atlantic Region, USA | | Affiliation | University of Wisconsin - Madison | | Authors | Sarah Olson, Jeffrey Cardille, Murray Clayton, Joseph Bunnell, Scott Heckle, Jonathan Patz | | Keywords | Deciduous forest, Lyme disease, Patch size, Risk map, Ticks | | Presentation Type | Poster | Abstract:
At local scales, land use and cover changes have been shown to alter Lyme disease risk directly, via the ecology of the vector, hosts, or reservoirs, and indirectly via human behavior and settlement patterns. Our objective was to create a regional model of Lyme disease risk for the Mid-Atlantic USA based on landscape metrics, measures of landscape patterning, from a remotely sensed image and an extensive tick survey carried out in 1997 and 1998. We calculated the composition and configuration of forest and deciduous land cover types for 65,000 approximately one kilometer square non-overlapping landscapes in the Mid-Atlantic region with METALAND software based on the 1990 National Land Cover Data map with 30m x 30m pixel resolution. Next, we spatially consolidated tick abundance survey data into 175 sites and linked them to specific landscapes with their associated metrics. Finally, we created a risk map by interpolating a log-linear regression across the full set of landscapes. Tick habitat suitability was significantly related to percent deciduous forest and mean forest patch size. In our model, increasing mean forest patch size and percent deciduous forest cover decreased the likelihood of finding adult ticks. We find evidence that for landscapes with deciduous forest – similar to the inhibiting effect of evergreen forests – the number of adult ticks declines as the forest patch size increases. These findings support the connection between disease risk and land cover, and as such, provide further rationale for improving collaboration between health and land planning professionals. |
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