Data from: Missing the people for the trees: identifying coupled natural-human system feedbacks driving the ecology of Lyme disease

1. Infectious diseases are rapidly emerging and many are increasing in
incidence across the globe. Processes of land-use change, notably habitat
loss and fragmentation, have been widely implicated in emergence and
spread of zoonoses such as Lyme disease, yet evidence remains equivocal.
2. Here we discuss and apply an innovative approach from the social
sciences, instrumental variables, that seeks to tease out causality from
observational data. Using this approach, we revisit the effect of forest
fragmentation on Lyme disease incidence, focusing on human interaction
with fragmented landscapes. Though human interaction with infected ticks
is of clear and fundamental importance to human disease incidence, human
activities that influence exposure have been nearly universally overlooked
in the ecology literature. 3. Using county-level land-use and Lyme disease
incidence data for ~800 counties from the northeastern United States over
the span of a decade, we illustrate (1) human interaction with fragmented
forest landscapes reliably predicts Lyme disease incidence, while
ecological measures of forest fragmentation alone are unreliable
predictors and (2) that identifying the effect of forest fragmentation on
human disease requires addressing the feedback between Lyme disease risk
and human decisions to avoid interaction with high-risk landscapes. 4.
Synthesis and applications. The innovative approach and novel results help
to clarify the equivocal literature on forest fragmentation and Lyme
disease, and illustrate the key role that human behavior may be playing in
the ecology of Lyme disease in North America. Accounting for human
activity and behavior in the ecology of disease more broadly may result in
improved understanding of both the ecological drivers of disease, as well
as actionable intervention strategies to reduce disease burden in a
changing world. For example, our model results have practical implications
for land-use policy aimed at disease reduction. Our model suggests land
use regulations that reduce parcel size would be an actionable approach
for policy makers concerned about increasing Lyme disease incidence in the
northeastern US.10-Oct-2018