Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Risk mapping and targeted snail control to support schistosomiasis elimination in Brazil and Cote d'Ivoire under future environmental change

该奖项为参与一个由55个国家发起的全球变化研究计划通过贝尔蒙特论坛竞争性选定的项目的美国研究人员提供支持。贝尔蒙特论坛是一个研究资助组织联盟，专注于支持以跨学科方法应对全球环境变化的挑战和机遇。它的目的是通过协调和调动国际资源，加速开展最迫切需要的国际研究，以消除对可持续性的关键障碍。每个伙伴国都在一个联合体内为其研究人员提供资金，以减轻跨越国际边界的资金需求。这种方法有助于有效地利用国家资源，支持对具有全球相关性的主题的优秀研究，最好是通过多国方法来解决，认识到全球挑战需要全球解决方案。在这一合作研究行动中，伙伴机构提供支持，培养全球自然(包括气候)、健康和社会科学家以及来自全球的利益攸关方组成的全球跨学科研究团队，以提高对气候、环境和健康途径的理解，以保护和促进健康。这些项目将对气候变化和变异性对以下方面的健康影响提供至关重要的新理解：1)食物的质量/数量；2)长期暴露在高温和湿度的增加/变化中；3)一系列传染病的分布和发病率的变化以及新病原体的出现。该奖项支持美国研究人员在由至少三个参与国的合作伙伴组成的财团中开展合作，以增加我们对气候、环境和健康之间复杂联系和途径的了解，以帮助解决社会面临的复杂挑战。该项目旨在调查环境和土地利用变化，如水管理基础设施的发展，对蜗牛传播的血吸虫病分布的综合影响，这是一种使人衰弱的贫穷寄生虫病，影响着全世界2亿多人。这项研究将重点放在巴西和象牙海岸，因为这些国家特别容易受到这种寄生虫病的影响，因为预计气候变化与人口增长、森林砍伐、农业和边缘城市环境的扩张以及大坝和灌溉渠的发展相结合。该项目将结合不同的模型类型，以了解物种是如何分布的，以应对血吸虫病的相关社会经济和环境驱动因素，以制作预测环境条件下血吸虫病当前和未来风险的地图。该项目将通过将血吸虫病传播模型与遥感以及血吸虫病风险的其他生态、环境和社会经济驱动因素的地理信息系统空间表示相结合，在开发描述血吸虫病风险的新方法方面向前迈出重要的一步。该项目将把不同尺度的现场数据与理论结合起来，调查寄生虫传播的人和自然因素之间的关联，以提高对血吸虫病风险预期未来分布的理解。该项目将提供一个参考框架，以调查影响世界上超过15亿最贫穷人口的蜗牛传播和土壤传播感染的广泛家庭的环境决定因素。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams of natural (including climate), health and social scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to improve understanding of climate, environment and health pathways to protect and promote health. The projects will provide crucial new understanding into the health implications arising from the impacts of climate change and variability on; 1) the quality/quantity of food, 2) chronic exposure to increases/changes in heat and humidity and 3) changes in the distribution and incidence of a range of infectious diseases and emergence of novel pathogens. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways between the climate, environment and health to help solve complex challenges that face societies. The project seeks to investigate the combined effect of environmental and land use change, such as the development of water management infrastructures, on the distribution of snail-borne schistosomiasis, a debilitating parasitic disease of poverty, affecting more than 200 million people worldwide. The study will focus on Brazil and Ivory Coast as these countries are countries particularly vulnerable to this parasitic disease as a consequence of projected climate change combined with growing human population, deforestation, expansion of agriculture and of marginal urban settings and the development of dams and irrigation canals. The project will couple different model types to understand how species are distributed in response to relevant socio-economic and environmental drivers of schistosomiasis to produce maps of present and future risk for schistosomiasis under projected environmental conditions. The project will provide a major step forward in the development of novel ways to profile schistosomiasis risk by integrating models of schistosomiasis transmission with remote sensing and GIS spatial representation of other ecological, environmental and socioeconomic drivers of schistosomaisis risk. The project will combine field data at different scales with theory to investigate the linked human and natural drivers of parasite transmission to improve understanding of the expected future distribution of schistosomiasis risk. The project will provide a reference framework to investigate the environmental determinants of a wide family of snail-borne and soil-transmitted infections affecting over 1.5 billion of the world’s poorest people.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.