US-Israel Collab: Market Integration, Land Use, and Pathogen Transmission

从自给农业到种植经济作物的转变改变了地貌和生活方式，对人类健康产生了积极和消极的影响，包括接触传染病。该项目研究农村农民向经济作物过渡时的传染病暴露，以了解市场一体化如何影响人类活动模式，以及社区内和社区间疾病传播的影响，并调查农业如何影响小型哺乳动物（如老鼠）的运动和丰度，这些哺乳动物携带可传播给人类的传染病（人畜共患病）。跨学科研究团队汇集了来自生态学，进化人类学，社会学，数学，传染病，环境科学和经济学的专家。该项目支持几个更广泛的影响，其中包括在现场生态学，社会科学和网络科学的学生培训;开发一个新的跨学科团队科学研讨会;并建立国际合作伙伴关系，以加强全球健康研究。该研究小组还开发了了解疾病爆发和区域传播的方法，确定人类土地使用如何影响哺乳动物及其病原体，并为农村社区提供关键的公共卫生信息。 该研究调查了市场一体化如何影响病原体在当地传播的具体假设，放大区域传染病风险的市场因素，以及影响人类和动物宿主不同规模传播的具体农业活动。研究的优势在于整合自然科学和社会科学方法，包括收集社会经济和人口数据，以及收集关于各种人畜共患和人类特有传染病的生态数据。该团队应用新的链接预测方法来弥补缺失的数据，社会科学的网络方法来确定不同个体的流行病学作用，以及社会生态网络方法来研究人类活动如何影响小型哺乳动物及其病原体的运动。 这些网络可以评估最近和未来的土地利用变化如何影响人畜共患病从小型哺乳动物传播到人类，然后在社区内和社区之间传播。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

The shift from subsistence agriculture to farming cash crops modifies landscapes and lifestyles in ways that impact human health both positively and negatively, including through exposure to infectious diseases. This project studies infectious disease exposure in rural farmers transitioning to cash crops to understand how market integration influences human movement patterns, with implications for disease transmission within and between communities, and to investigate how farming influences the movement and abundance of small mammals, such as rats, that harbor infectious diseases that can spread to humans (zoonoses). The interdisciplinary research team brings together experts from ecology, evolutionary anthropology, sociology, mathematics, infectious diseases, environmental sciences, and economics. The project supports several broader impacts, which include student training in field ecology, social science, and network science; developing a new Interdisciplinary Team Science Workshop; and building international partnerships to enhance global health research. The research team also develops methods to understand disease outbreaks and regional transmission, identify how human land use affects mammals and their pathogens, and provide critical public health information to rural communities. The research investigates specific hypotheses for how market integration influences pathogen transmission locally, the market factors that amplify infectious disease risk regionally, and the specific agricultural activities that influence transmission at different scales in human and animal hosts. A strength of the research involves the integration of natural and social science approaches, including collection of socioeconomic and demographic data, and assembling ecological data on a wide array of zoonotic and human-specific infectious diseases. The team applies new link prediction methods to compensate for missing data, network methods from social sciences to identify epidemiological roles of different individuals, and social-ecological network approaches to investigate how human activities influence movement of small mammals and their pathogens. These networks can assess how recent and future land use change influences zoonotic disease transmission from small mammals into people and then within and across communities.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.