SENZOR: A social-ecological network approach to understanding zoonotic outbreak risk

Project overview

To understand the risk of zoonotic outbreaks, we need to create a more comprehensive understanding of local-scale infection dynamics.

Here, we will sample small-bodied wild animals, domestic animals, and humans in a systematic, structured sampling regime. Over three years, we will sample across two landscape types, highly agricultural and seminatural, in The Gambia and Nigeria.

We will build contact networks for a select group of high-risk viral pathogens for all local actors involved in transmission. We will employ participatory modelling and ethnographic methods to gain a deeper insight into how humans interact with this network. Finally, we will use a socio-ecological systems modelling approach to predict risks across landscapes and plausible future scenarios, which will inform outbreak preparedness and management strategies.

Our aims

The overarching aim of our project is to better understand how human-landscape interactions in West Africa affect the types of zoonotic pathogens people are exposed to through our influences on host-pathogen networks.

Specifically, we will focus on exploring, qualifying and quantifying the main contact routes between people and those wild and domestic animals that carry high-burden, neglected and currently unknown potential zoonotic pathogens.

We pay particular attention to how contact is influenced by both human and environmental factors. On the human side, we will consider the socio-ecological, economic and behavioural characteristics of rural populations involved in varying types of farming activities.

On the environmental side, we will resolve the effects and differing degrees of agricultural landscape change, ranging from near-natural to more intensively farmed. Importantly, we treat these human and environmental factors as intrinsically linked; for instance, human farming practices and their impacts on natural landscapes are often dictated by seasons as well as the types of crops grown or livestock raised.

Who is involved?

The SENZOR project investigates pathogen communities in The Gambia and Nigeria through metabarcoding and seasonal surveys to understand pathogen dynamics in regions with differing agricultural development. PhD student Santi Gomez is working as part of this project.

Our methods

To better understand the circulation of pathogens, we will build and compare two sets of networks and statistically compare them.

We define networks as consisting of nodes (e.g. different human groups, animal species, domestic animals defined as actors) and edges between the nodes, which represent the direction and strength of interactions between nodes.

This research will map interactions between humans, animals and the environment through social science methods that recognise the connection between different agents and combine this with molecular analyses to understand the connection between social interactions and pathogen transmission.

Our role

We provide expertise in ecological and climate modelling that will help understand how changing ecosystems and landscapes might shape human-animal interactions and influence the transmission of zoonotic pathogens.