Résumé
Biogeography is an implicit and fundamental component of almost every
dimension of modern biology, from natural selection and speciation to
invasive species and biodiversity management. However, biogeography has
rarely been integrated into human or veterinary medicine nor routinely
leveraged for global health management. Here we review the theory and
application of biogeography to the research and management of human
infectious diseases, an integration we refer to as ‘pathogeography’.
Pathogeography represents a promising framework for understanding and
decomposing the spatial distributions, diversity patterns and emergence
risks of human infectious diseases into interpretable components of
dynamic socio-ecological systems. Analytical tools from biogeography are
already helping to improve our understanding of individual infectious
disease distributions and the processes that shape them in space and time.
At higher levels of organization, biogeographical studies of diseases are
rarer but increasing, improving our ability to describe and explain
patterns that emerge at the level of disease communities (e.g.,
co-occurrence, diversity patterns, biogeographic regionalisation). Even in
a highly globalized world most human infectious diseases remain
constrained in their geographic distributions by ecological barriers to
the dispersal or establishment of their causal pathogens, reservoir hosts
and/or vectors. These same processes underpin the spatial arrangement of
other taxa, such as mammalian biodiversity, providing a strong empirical
‘prior’ with which to assess the potential distributions of infectious
diseases when data on their occurrence is unavailable or limited. In the
absence of quality data, generalized biogeographic patterns could provide
the earliest (and in some cases the only) insights into the potential
distributions of many poorly known or emerging, or as-yet-unknown,
infectious disease risks. Encouraging more community ecologists and
biogeographers to collaborate with health professionals (and vice versa)
has the potential to improve our understanding of infectious disease
systems and identify novel management strategies to improve local, global
and planetary health.