The association between land use and vector-borne and zoonotic disease has long been known and extensively studied. In a diversity of contexts, strong associations have been identified between hosts, vectors or pathogens and land cover and land use. The land system framework has evolved alongside the ecosystem service framework and more recently the framework of nature’s contribution to people. It recognizes that land is used to serve a diversity of demands by a diversity of users, and that management decisions are driven by a diversity of elements, some of which may lead to more favorable tradeoffs between competing demands. I will focus on three elements that are of particular relevance: intensity of use, interfaces and institutional context, acknowledging that all parts of the transmission system of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases can be affected: vector, host, pathogen. These features of land systems affect infectious disease geography in a way that warrants both a re-examination of how land use is monitored for the purpose of understanding temporal and spatial dynamics of diseases and more attention to pathogens as a feature of land systems in the same way that biodiversity is considered. Detailed conceptual frameworks exist that consider explicitly land use effects on all aspects of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases, such as the resource-based habitat concept. The resource-based habitat concept starts by listing all functions of each organism involved in the pathogen transmission system. It then proceeds to identify the corresponding environmental resources associated to each function, allowing to consider multiple, diverse roles for a single land use. In this talk, we will explore how a land system approach can support existing conceptual frameworks such as the resource-based habitat concept for vector-borne and zoonotic diseases to help us reach a finer understanding of landscape level associations between the environment and infectious diseases.
Mots clés : land use|land systems|infectious diseases|vector-borne diseases|zoonotic diseases
A103963SV