International audienceChagas disease is a vector-borne disease and a major public health concern in Latin America. To understand the disease dynamics, we investigated the influence of landscape heterogeneity and host diversity on pathogen transmission. We developed an epidemiological model based on the cellular automata approach to simulate the spread of Chagas disease in homogeneous and heterogeneous environments with competent and noncompetent hosts species. We show at first that weak levels of dispersal are associated with a reduction in infection as vectors infected in habitats of high transmission tend to spread into habitats with fewer hosts. A second important conclusion is that larger levels of dispersal can have very contrasted effects depending on the composition of the host community in the area of lower intrinsic transmission

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Abstract. This paper presents mathematical and numerical results for a cellular automaton model describing the transmission dynamics of Chagas disease in both homogeneous and heterogeneous environments. The basic reproduction number R0 which integrates factors that determine whether the pathogen can establish or not will be computed using the next-generation matrix approach. The simulation results show the effect of landscape heterogeneity in the vector transmission.