Mapping current and future potential snakebite risk in the new world

Estimating geographic patterns of ophidism risk in Ecuador

“…human activities, type of housing, population's age) that are known to be causal of snakebites [1][2][3]. However, previous evidence has shown that ecological niche modelling is usually successful at inferring geographic patterns of ophidism at continental [5], country [26] and regional scales [7]. This is particularly useful to infer potential snakebite risk areas when hospital data are scarce or biased.…”

“…Following Yañez-Arenas et al [5], we built a snakebite risk map that approximates the probability of being bitten by a venomous snake at a given cell. We estimated snakebite risk by stacking ecological niche models and weighing each species by a number related to the proportion of bites caused by it.…”

“…We are confident that excluding these species did not affect our analysis because they have characteristics (e.g. rareness, restricted distributions, low abundance) that would greatly reduce the frequency of bites [5]. Besides, the majority of snakebites in Ecuador are caused by only six species [4,9,10].…”

“…Ecuador has a great diversity of venomous snakes (~36 species, which account to 5 and 19% of the diversity of the world and the Americas, respectively) [4], and one of the highest prevalence of snakebites in the continent [5]. However, epidemiologic studies in the country remains scarce [4].…”

“…Ecuador) [6]. As a result, correlative ecological niche models have been recently used to infer snakebite risk at regional and continental scales [5,7].…”