Novel integrated risk index reveals uneven impact of climate change on fascioliasis risk across Africa and Europe

van der Deure, T.; Mukaratirwa, S.; Chimbari, M.; Dube, A.; Manyangadze, T.; Sengupta, M. E.; Kinunghi, S.; Mita, R.; Walker, J.; Nyawanda, B.; Nogues-Bravo, D.; Stensgaard, A.-S.

doi:10.64898/2025.12.04.692276

bioRxiv · 10.64898/2025.12.04.692276

Novel integrated risk index reveals uneven impact of climate change on fascioliasis risk across Africa and Europe

van der Deure, T.·Mukaratirwa, S.·Chimbari, M.·Dube, A.·Manyangadze, T.·Sengupta, M. E.·Kinunghi, S.·Mita, R.·Walker, J.·Nyawanda, B.·Nogues-Bravo, D.·Stensgaard, A.-S.

View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Fascioliasis, a zoonotic parasitic disease caused by the liver flukes Fasciola hepatica and Fasciola gigantica, poses a significant threat to livestock and human health globally. Climate change is altering the transmission dynamics of this disease; however, the direction and magnitude of this change remain uncertain due to a lack of mechanistically grounded predictions at continental scale. In this study, we developed a novel risk index to assess how climate change may affect the potential for fascioliasis transmission across Africa and Europe. The index integrates the following three components that together capture the environmental requirements for Fasciola transmission: the temperature dependence of the parasite transmission; climatic suitability for the snail intermediate host; and availability of freshwater habitats. To estimate these components, we used data from published experimental studies, thousands of snail occurrence records, and both mechanistic and correlative modelling approaches. We predict that climate change will generally reduce fascioliasis risk across most of the ranges of the two investigated liver fluke species, albeit with marked geographical differences. The transmission risk of F. gigantica is predicted to decrease in the Sahel and West Africa, due to above-optimal temperatures for parasite transmission and climatic suitability for the intermediate hosts. However, risk for F. hepatica transmission is projected to increase in parts of Northern Europe, Scandinavia, and Iceland, where livestock densities are high. We also find that the potential for hybridization between F. hepatica and F. gigantica may decline due to reduced geographic overlap in areas that are highly suitable for transmission. By providing a scalable, ecologically informed framework for predicting fascioliasis risk under climate change, this study lays the groundwork for improved local risk assessment. Our results provide a more nuanced perspective on the potential impact of climate change on fascioliasis transmission, showing that this will be highly uneven across Africa and Europe. Author summaryFascioliasis is a snail-borne, zoonotic disease that affects both humans and livestock, causing major health burden and economic losses worldwide. The liver flukes that cause the disease use freshwater snails as their intermediate hosts. They therefore require aquatic habitats and suitable temperatures to complete their life cycle. Climate change altering these conditions; however, it is unclear how this will affect transmission of liver flukes in the future. Here we develop a new risk index that combines three key environmental factors of importance for liver fluke transmission: how suitable temperatures are for parasite transmission, the climatic suitability for snail hosts, and the availability of water. We mapped current and projected future transmission risk for two main species, Fasciola hepatica and Fasciola gigantica, across Africa and Europe. Different from what has been predicted by earlier studies, our results suggest that transmission risk will decline in across most of the range of both species. This will have particularly big impacts in areas where livestock densities are high, including the Sahel region. In northern Europe, transmission risk increases slightly. This study also provides a modelling framework and novel ecological knowledge that can be used to assess risk of transmission at local and continental scale.

Explore related subjects

ecology Preprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

van der Deure, T., Mukaratirwa, S., Chimbari, M., Dube, A., Manyangadze, T., Sengupta, M. E., Kinunghi, S., Mita, R., Walker, J., Nyawanda, B., Nogues-Bravo, D., Stensgaard, A.-S.. 2025-12-09. Novel integrated risk index reveals uneven impact of climate change on fascioliasis risk across Africa and Europe. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.04.692276

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Operationalising the context in regenerative agriculture: decision-making and farm variability

Soil degradation is a widespread challenge that requires a broad response at the individual farm level. To ensure effectivity, the practices should be tailored to the farm context: land manager objectives and farm specific challenges. These have however been difficult to quantify. Here we demonstrate that a workable farm context can be created based on a value survey, open satellite and soil data, and published models for vegetation gross primary productivity and soil erosion. Based on the findings, despite individual differences, farmers value profitability and operational efficiency, but also biodiversity and soil health. At least the regenerative farmers surveyed also value working for the greater good more than maintaining tradition or power. In spite of wide differences in farm production orientation, we also found that each farm also had a broad variation in individual fields GPP. Most fields have a stable GPP level, which is either high or low, and that there is a 2-3-fold difference between the weakest and best producing fields indicating the potential for improving GPP by improving the growing conditions on currently weak fields. In addition, soil loss was found to be highly concentrated in critical source areas, where 10% of the field area contributed to 50% of the soil loss. Overall, open data can be linked to modelling workflows to rapidly produce a decision-making context for farmers. This facilitates benchmarking and co-learning as well as enables land managers and advisors to identify the farm context for planning effective responses to soil degradation.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2026

Fly, land, listen: Autonomous intermittent locomotion enables scalable low-noise drone ecoacoustic surveys

Ecoacoustic monitoring is enabling scientists and land managers to monitor and manage biodiversity more effectively and cost-efficiently in the face of human pressures and rapidly changing climates. Currently, most ecoacoustic surveys use manually deployed static sensors to record data, limiting the scale and reach of surveying efforts. Here we present a proof-of-concept autonomous drone platform that can use intermittent locomotion to conduct ecoacoustic surveys using an onboard sensor. Our custom prototype is able to fly, navigate, and avoid obstacles autonomously, land at a pre-determined location, record audio from an onboard microphone whilst static, before taking off and moving to the next sampling site. Autonomous navigation and operation enable greater sampling flexibility, reach, and scalability. Furthermore, by recording audio only whilst landed, noise from the drone's rotors does not mask signals or disturb animals, simplifying signal processing and downstream ecological analyses. We conducted trials in a scrubland habitat at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, where our prototype demonstrated successful autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance. Furthermore, we found that avian biodiversity data collected from the drone platform was comparable to that from traditional static acoustic sensor deployments, and that vocalisation patterns were not significantly impacted by the noise of the drone arriving or leaving a site. While scaled deployments of our technology would require further technical and regulatory challenges to be solved, our first demonstration of autonomous intermittent robotics-assisted ecoacoustic surveys lays the foundations for more cost-effective and far-reaching biodiversity surveys, with transformative potential for conservation, agricultural management, biosecurity, and more.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2026

Do higher-order moments improve inference of population dynamics?

Fitting mathematical models of population dynamics to microbial time-series data allows us to estimate the ecological processes and interactions taking place in the microbiome. Repeated experiments of microbial systems yield replicates which slightly differ from each other. Some of this variability arises due to the fact that births and deaths occur at random. Most prior work focuses on fitting a deterministic mathematical model to the average across replicates. We use a stochastic model to fit the variability to the observed variability across replicates. Using a simulation-driven approach, we study the conditions under which our approach allows us to infer a larger fraction of ecological parameters correctly. We observe a substantial improvement in parameter inference. Lastly, our Bayesian approach not only allows us to incorporate prior information about the system, but also provides a distribution of parameters which conveys some idea of the uncertainty of the estimates.

ecology↗