| The aim of this dissertation is to develop an integrated, new regional perspective of how climate and landscape conditions affect critical vector-borne diseases in the tropics and temperate latitudes. In particular, my research focuses on the effects of climate and land use and cover change on malaria in the Amazon Basin, and the effects of landscape fragmentation on Lyme disease in the United States. This work lays a spatial ecological foundation for new predictive models of human vector-borne infectious diseases.;Disease vectors and agents are dependent on their environment, and I first reviewed the known links of malaria and Lyme disease to climate, land use and cover, and ecology. Following the overview of current literature, I examined how climatic factors, specifically precipitation, affect the ecology of malaria across the Brazilian Amazon. Next, I built on literature reporting malaria and deforestation connections at isolated research sites, and identified the same eco-epidemiological association operates in Mancio Lima a county in Acre State, Brazil. I developed and piloted a methodology that uses landscape metrics---such as fragmentation, edge, and landscape mixtures---and their context in the regional landscape to display the linkages of landscape ecology and the adult tick Lyme vector that persist in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.;The main achievement of this thesis has been to show that scientific findings of ecological disease risk do translate across spatial scales and associate with human health risk. High-resolution spatial health and environmental data connect the dots between vector ecology, vector abundance, and human disease risk. |
