The Use of Ecological Niche Modeling to Infer Potential Risk Areas of Snakebite in the Mexican State of Veracruz

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Issue Date
2014-06-24Author
Yáñez-Arenas, Carlos
Peterson, A. Townsend
Mokondoko, Pierre
Rojas-Soto, Octavio
Martínez-Meyer, Enrique
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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BackgroundMany authors have claimed that snakebite risk is associated with human population density, human activities, and snake behavior. Here we analyzed whether environmental suitability of vipers can be used as an indicator of snakebite risk. We tested several hypotheses to explain snakebite incidence, through the construction of models incorporating both environmental suitability and socioeconomic variables in Veracruz, Mexico.
Methodology/Principal FindingsEcological niche modeling (ENM) was used to estimate potential geographic and ecological distributions of nine viper species' in Veracruz. We calculated the distance to the species' niche centroid (DNC); this distance may be associated with a prediction of abundance. We found significant inverse relationships between snakebites and DNCs of common vipers (Crotalus simus and Bothrops asper), explaining respectively 15% and almost 35% of variation in snakebite incidence. Additionally, DNCs for these two vipers, in combination with marginalization of human populations, accounted for 76% of variation in incidence.
Conclusions/SignificanceOur results suggest that niche modeling and niche-centroid distance approaches can be used to mapping distributions of environmental suitability for venomous snakes; combining this ecological information with socioeconomic factors may help with inferring potential risk areas for snakebites, since hospital data are often biased (especially when incidences are low).
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Citation
Yañez-Arenas, Carlos; A. Townsend Peterson, Pierre Mokondoko, Octavio Rojas-Soto, Enrique Martínez-Meyer. " The Use of Ecological Niche Modeling to Infer Potential Risk Areas of Snakebite in the Mexican State of Veracruz." PLoS One. 2014; 9(6): e100957. Published online 2014 June 25. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0100957
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.