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

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.