The impacts of climate on several aspects of vector-borne pathogen transmission are well known, but predictions of the impact of future climate change are challenging because of opposing forces. For example, increasing temperatures are known to increase vector biting rates, larval development, and pathogen replication within the vector but also decrease vector survival. Increasing precipitation can also have mixed effects on pathogen transmission through nonlinear effects on mosquito abundance. Here we integrate quantitative relationships of these factors to predict the impact of climate on transmission on West Nile virus.
Results/Conclusions
We found that many climate-transmission relationships were nonlinear in nature which resulted in highly variable outcomes dependent on stochastic variability in each of the contributing factors. As a result, fine scale prediction of the impact of climate change on the transmission of vector borne disease will be challenging.