DOI: 10.5061/dryad.zw3r228f6
title: Data from: Evidence of repeated zoonotic pathogen spillover events at ecological boundaries

description: Human encroachment in natural habitats poses a significant threat to
 humans and wildlife but remains drastically understudied. By forming new
 ecological boundaries at the human/wildlife interface, anthropogenic
 modifications to the landscape have altered several ecological processes
 and disturbed ecological integrity and resilience worldwide. Outbreaks of
 zoonotic pathogens often occur in human populations at these ecological
 boundaries, but the mechanisms behind these new emergences remain under
 investigation. Here, we aim to unravel the roles of both landscape and
 biotic communities by comparing the characteristics of presence and
 pseudo-absence localities to provide a better mechanistic understanding of
 zoonotic disease emergence. Using the Ebola virus as a model, we link
 pathogen reservoirs and accidental host ranges with human land use using a
 machine learning framework. Our results show that species range edges and
 conversion from wildlands to agricultural areas increase Ebola outbreak
 risk. Moreover, we show clear evidence that species range edges are
 predominantly composed of agricultural landscape, possibly amplifying
 pathogen outbreaks. Given the current rate of landscape modification
 worldwide, we provide novel ecological and evolutionary insights to our
 understanding of zoonotic pathogen emergence and highlight the risk of
 aggressively developing ecological boundaries.
description: We compiled all reported outbreaks with human cases from Kuhn
 (2008), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC 2023), and ProMED (Yu and
 Lawrence 2004). We then pruned the dataset to include only outbreaks
 confirmed to be Ebola virus (including both <em>Sudan
 ebolavirus</em> and <em>Zaire ebolavirus</em>) by
 laboratory testing and that originated from a wild source (e.g., we
 excluded data points from accidental laboratory spillover events). For
 each outbreak, we compiled the date of outbreak, its geographical origin,
 and the number of human cases, allowing us to work with 44 outbreaks
 ranging from 1976 to 2020, inclusively (and excluding outbreaks reported
 after we initiated our work).
description: # Data from Evidence of repeated zoonotic spillover events at ecological
 boundaries Dataset comprises all reported Ebola outbreaks originating from
 Spillover events (more details in the published manuscript) ## Description
 of file structure * `bat_sp`: Minimum distances for all reported outbreak
 and the edge of bat species ranges, used to create phylogenetic figure *
 `prim_sp`: Minimum distances for all reported outbreak and the edge of
 primate species ranges, used to create phylogenetic figure *
 `Ebola_complete_data04052023`: Dataset used to run the analysis *
 `Trait.R`: R code to test species trait influence *
 `GBM_analysis_Ebola_Vmanucript.R`: R code used to run all the analysis in
 the manuscript, needs the Ebola complete dataset to work ## Description of
 the data This dataset has numerous column related to all the variables
 extracted from spatial analysis, fully described in the text. Here is a
 breakdown by column types for Ebola_complete_data04052023: * Number of
 cases: Number of human cases of Ebola (empty cells represent no case
 number reported for that outbreak) * Lat/Long: Coordinates of Outbreak *
 Outbreak: 0 represent pseudo-absence datapoints, 1 represents confirmed
 Ebola outbreak * L2: Identifier for remerging data, can be tossed out *
 From Cropland to Dense_settlements columns: Proportion (from 0-1) of SEDAC
 land use types * Nb_lt: How many land types there are * diversity:
 Calculated with the vegan package in R, Simpson diversity index for land
 types * All of the Min_dist columns: Minimum distance from each outbreak
 to the range edges for all individual fruit bat and primate species in the
 IUCN database For all distance columns, the st_distance call from the sf
 package returns the value in meters. ## Code/Software Code is provided
 with this submission, fully annotated