Timothée Poisot

Understanding where reservoirs live could go a long way towards figuring out where it is most effective to sample for wildlife diseases. And yet, this approach has been quite under-used so far.

In a new preprint, we come up with a series of guidelines to decide where to sample based on the amount of data on either the distribution of reservoirs, or the prevalence of the target pathogen.

A core novelty of our approach is that our sampling recommendations are fully accounting for the uncertainty in the reconstruction of the reservoir distribution. Not only is this the transparent thing to do, it allows users to establish different types of sampling: learn more about biodiversity, learn more about prevalence, learn more about both.

This is a first step towards multi-purpose observation networks for biodiversity and zoonoses.