CNH-L: Coupled Dynamics of Tourism and Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission in the Americas

该研究项目以美洲为重点，将研究蚊子传播疾病的传播、对疾病风险的认识和人类旅行之间的关系。受感染人群的流动有可能引发全球性的鲜为人知的蚊媒疾病流行，类似于2013年和2015年分别首次发现基孔肯雅病毒和寨卡病毒后在美洲发生的情况。研究人员将调查人类运动模式对蚊子与人类相互作用以及蚊媒病毒跨地区传播（从当地到大陆距离）的贡献。该项目将试图了解传染病的爆发如何影响个人的旅行决定以及旅游企业的营销策略。 该团队还将研究应对疫情和营销的人类流动性变化如何改变疫情路径。该项目将通过为美国的本科生、研究生和博士后研究人员提供疾病生态学、数学和地理信息科学方面的跨学科教育和培训机会，造福社会。作为该项目一部分开发的数据集将通过公共存储库提供，并伴有在线和面对面的教育讲习班。该项目将使用流行病学建模和数据科学技术来模拟人类活动及其对蚊媒疾病爆发的影响（即，基孔肯雅和寨卡病毒），从半球到局部空间尺度，使用丰富的信息源流（例如，移动的电话和社交媒体数据）。特别是，研究人员将评估真实的人类移动网络（即，网络主干）作为蚊媒病毒的潜在传播途径，并评估重要网络节点的理论指标的能力（例如，在最近的寨卡和基孔肯雅疫情爆发期间，这项研究将把人类流动性作为蚊媒疾病风险预测模型的一个参数。研究结果将与社会科学混合方法的研究方法相结合，以说明传染病的爆发，以及相关的旅游警告和旅游营销的变化如何影响个人旅行者的运动选择，以及这些选择如何扩大以改变流行病的轨迹。考虑到蚊媒疾病的出现和国际和国内旅游作为一个耦合的自然-人类系统，将使研究人员能够评估不同干预策略的有效性，以抑制传播，蚊子控制工作的知识对健康的影响。以及改变旅行模式以应对疾病风险感知的可能性，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Focusing on the Americas, this research project will examine the relationships among the spread of mosquito-transmitted diseases, perceptions of disease risk, and human travel. The movement of infected humans has the potential to spark global epidemics of poorly-known mosquito-borne diseases, similar to those that occurred in the Americas following the first detection of chikungunya and Zika viruses in 2013 and 2015, respectively. The researchers will investigate the contribution of human movement patterns to mosquito-human interactions and to the spread of mosquito-borne viruses across regions (from local to continental distances). The project will seek to understand how infectious disease outbreaks influence the decisions of individuals to travel as well as marketing strategies of tourism businesses. The team will also look at how changes in human mobility in response to outbreaks and marketing might alter outbreak paths. The project will benefit society by offering interdisciplinary education and training opportunities in disease ecology, mathematics, and geographic information science for undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers in the U.S. Participatory workshops with public health and tourism stakeholders will seek to develop management strategies and actions to address mosquito-borne disease threats. The data sets developed as part of the project will be made available through public repositories accompanied by online and face-to-face educational workshops.The project will use epidemiological modeling and data science techniques to model human movements and their impact on outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases (i.e., chikungunya and Zika viruses), from hemispheric to local spatial scales using a rich stream of information sources (e.g., mobile phone and social media data). In particular, the researchers will evaluate the significance of the most traveled routes of real human mobility networks (i.e., the network backbone) as potential dispersal pathways for mosquito-borne viruses, and assess the ability of theoretical indicators of vital network nodes (e.g., most connected cities and countries) to predict the occurrence of super-spreading hubs of high transmission during the recent outbreaks of Zika and chikungunya. This research will incorporate human mobility as a parameter in predictive models for mosquito-borne disease risk. The results will be integrated with a social science mixed methods research approach to represent how outbreaks of infectious disease, together with associated travel warnings and changes in tourism marketing, influence individual travelers' movement choices and how these choices scale up to alter the trajectory of epidemics. The consideration of mosquito-borne disease emergence and international and domestic tourism as a coupled natural-human system will allow the researchers to assess the efficacy of different intervention strategies to inhibit transmission, the impacts of knowledge of mosquito control efforts on the health risk perceptions of travelers and tourism companies, and the potential for altered travel patterns in response to disease risk perceptions to influence the spatio-temporal trajectory of an epidemic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.