Infectious Disease Sensitivity to Climate and Other Driver‐Pressure Changes: Research Effort and Gaps for Lyme Disease and Cryptosporidiosis

Abstract

Climate sensitivity of infectious diseases is discussed in many studies. A quantitative basis for distinguishing and predicting the disease impacts of climate and other environmental and anthropogenic driver‐pressure changes, however, is often lacking. To assess research effort and identify possible key gaps that can guide further research, we here apply a scoping review approach to two widespread infectious diseases: Lyme disease (LD) as a vector‐borne and cryptosporidiosis as a water‐borne disease. Based on the emerging publication data, we further structure and quantitatively assess the driver‐pressure foci and interlinkages considered in the published research so far. This shows important research gaps for the roles of rarely investigated water‐related and socioeconomic factors for LD, and land‐related factors for cryptosporidiosis. For both diseases, the interactions of host and parasite communities with climate and other driver‐pressure factors are understudied, as are also important world regions relative to the disease geographies; in particular, Asia and Africa emerge as main geographic gaps for LD and cryptosporidiosis research, respectively. The scoping approach developed and gaps identified in this study should be useful for further assessment and guidance of research on infectious disease sensitivity to climate and other environmental and anthropogenic changes around the world.

Research Gaps and Priorities for Terrestrial Water and Earth System Connections From Catchment to Global Scale

“…For the former, we used the manual search and also screened the full text of papers if further clarification was needed to look for and exclude possible duplicate, irrelevant or incomplete papers, and finally also refine the automatic search results to only include papers written in English. Regarding missing papers, WoS is a multidisciplinary database commonly used for scoping reviews, including for water‐related research (Ma et al., 2023; Rokaya et al., 2018; Vigouroux & Destouni, 2022). The automatic WoS searches are therefore expected to provide a sufficiently representative sample of relevant terrestrial water studies for capturing the real relative distribution of papers among the considered topics and categories, even if the absolute numbers of papers do not include all possible papers in each topic/category.…”

“…Moreover, pressures can refer to change causes that are either natural or human‐driven, such as human land‐use and water use. In consistency with other scoping reviews (Ma et al., 2023), we therefore use here the joint term drivers‐pressures for the climate, land‐use, water‐use and energy‐food nexus factors (a) in category (II). In addition, some research may have considered these and/or other factors explicitly as drivers in relation to the large‐scale GSW system and its interactions, and we therefore also consider such an “Explicit drivers” sub‐category (b) in category (II).…”

“…This study investigates how research on the large‐scale GSW system and its water flow, storage and quality has evolved over time, to what degree it has addressed the above‐discussed interactions, and how it has addressed them, that is, with which methods, at which specific large scales (from whole‐catchment to global), for which parts of the world, and for which water constituents with regard to water quality. To this end, we use a scoping review approach (Desai & Zhang, 2021; Ma et al., 2023; Munn et al., 2018; Peters et al., 2022; Vigouroux & Destouni, 2022). Based on the review results, we finally discuss and identify key topical, methodological and geographical research gaps and compelling priorities for further research on the large‐scale terrestrial GSW system and its interactions and roles in major challenges of Earth System change.…”

Exploring the Ecological Effects of Rural Land Use Changes: A Bibliometric Overview

“…As a basic material for agricultural production, cultivated land plays an important role in natural evolution, human survival, the ecological cycle, resource economy, and other activities and is most widely and profoundly affected by human beings [54]. The loss of cultivated land is a product of direct or indirect human interference [55]. On the one hand, it is the loss of cultivated land use-the transformation of the type of cultivated land utilization [56].…”