Gurgel-Gonçalves, Rodrigo, et al. “Geographic distribution of Chagas disease vectors in Brazil based on ecological niche modeling.” Journal of tropical medicine 2012 (2012)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/705326
Despite the efforts of domestic triatomine vector eradication, Chagas disease transmission in humans still poses a risk in Latin American countries. Determining risk in areas where sampling and data are insufficient or non-existent Gurgel Gonclaves et al, have turned to ENM to determine areas of risk that have been subject to poor sampling of triatomines with synanthropic tendencies resulting in low data resolution in Brazil. ENM was applied here to explore both geographic and ecological phenomena based on known occurrences of various species. They used 3563 records of occurrences within Brazil in which at least 20 unique occurrence points were chosen for 62 species (leaving only 17 to conduct ENM on). These points were analyzed with environmental data set NDVI and 19 bioclimatic WorldClim variables (conventionally used layers). MaxEnt was chosen due to the nature of the study at hand; because no extrapolation would be involved to apply or speculate distributions from other locations. Models from each species were then combined to overlay an area of risk within Brazil. To provide a view of species responses to environmental variation across Brazil, they plotted 1000 random points across the country and determined: 1. presence/absence of each species and 2. The values of the first two principal components of the bioclimatic data set. MaxEnt allowed them to determine that some triatomine species occur within specific biomes, while others are more generally occurring. They were able to detect biome association with specific triatomine occurrence. Determining high risk areas was one of the main objective for this paper, however because triatomines exist through Brazil, determining high risk areas could easily have been just the locations of rural villages. Other than using that reason to conduct the ENM, it otherwise seemed most useful when determining which environmental characteristics drive species distribution at the geographic level. Furthermore, have limited data on 62 species and only being able to conduct ENM on 17 species shows that the amount and type of data is very crucial and so this method is not very useful in studying rare or elusive triatomine species, which would overall be more interesting and probably most important.