boris.earthZiektes in het Wild, en Andere ZakenZola2021-01-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.boris.earth/nl/atom.xmlNordemics, 2021-20242021-01-01T00:00:00+00:002021-01-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.boris.earth/nl/projects/nordemics/<p>NORDEMICS is a Scandinavian consortium that aims to understand how changes in
society and climate influenced epidemics in the Nordic countries in the past 300
years.</p>
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<p>The consortium takes full advantage of the outstanding records kept by Nordic
countries, which has produced troves of quantitative health and mortality data
stretching far into the past.</p>
<p>You can read more at the <a href="https://ruc.dk/en/forskningsprojekt/pathogens-pandemics-and-development-nordic-societies">website of Nordemics</a></p>
REA:Life, 2019-20222019-10-01T00:00:00+00:002019-10-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.boris.earth/nl/projects/rea-life/<p>REA:Life is a collaboration between researchers from the National and Cultural
History, Pharmacy and Biology departments at the University of Oslo, Norway. We
investigate lost medicinal recipes, and test these for bioactive compounds using
the latest methods in pharmacology, immunology and metagenomics.</p>
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<img src="https://www.boris.earth/processed_images/db5e9d14dd6e39bb00.png" class="borderless" alt="Medicinal plants and recipes, from historic books"/>
<figcaption>Logo of REA:Life, created by Barth van Rossum</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The consortium is an interdisciplinary natural and cultural sciences project that traces the prevalence of disease and the history of societies’ increasing awareness of epidemiological disease during the Age of Exploration (15th - 18th century).</p>
<p>You can read more at the <a href="https://www.uio.no/english/research/strategic-research-areas/life-science/research/convergence-environments/realife/">website of REA:Life</a></p>
Limits of Plague, 2019-20232019-04-01T00:00:00+00:002019-04-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.boris.earth/nl/projects/limits-of-plague/<p>Plague is still widespread, but the rules for where plague can exist in the wild
are unknown. For non-ecologists, it is tempting to assume that certain rodent
species are associated with plague reservoirs, but that intuition breaks down rapidly when
you start comparing rodent species maps with plague reservoir maps.</p>
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<p>There are plenty of examples: marmots are important plague reservoirs in Central Asia, but not in the Alpes; black rats are a reservoir
of plague in the highlands of Madagascar, but virtually nowhere else. </p>
<p>Which rodents populations can be long-term plague reservoirs that can harbor plague for decades has long puzzled observers.
To answer that question is the primary objective of <em>"Limits of Plague"</em>. We will approach this problem by building
ecological niche models (ENMs) that avoid the limitations of other attempts
(which were focused on a regional scope only, using limited datasets, and generic
rather than plague-specific input variables). With a vast amount of data now
available from surveillance programmes from the former USSR, the USA, Brazil and China, and from historical
records, the main challenge for us lies in using the right methodology to build
and project ENMs as far across the globe as is reliably possible, and to test
and select the right plague-relevant input variables for the models (e.g.climate
instability, soil properties).</p>
<p>Our first paper, piloting a next-generation Ecological Niche Model is out now<sup class="footnote-reference"><a href="#Carlson_2021">1</a></sup></p>
<div class="footnote-definition" id="Carlson_2021"><sup class="footnote-definition-label">1</sup>
<p>Carlson, C.J., Bevins, S.N. and Schmid, B.V. (2022) <em>‘<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15966">Plague risk in the western United States over seven decades of environmental change</a>’</em>, Global change biology, 28(3), pp. 753–769.</p>
</div>
Plague Ecosystem Resilience to Intervention, 2016-20182016-07-01T00:00:00+00:002016-07-01T00:00:00+00:00https://www.boris.earth/nl/projects/peri/<p>In the PERI project, a collaboration between Oslo and Minnesota, we investigated the ecosystem-scale plague interventions of the former USSR, using archival works, interviews with Soviet plague researchers, and published (russian) work.</p>
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<img src="https://www.boris.earth/processed_images/f45fdcce15249edf00.png" class="borderless" alt="Picture of a timeline where the plague control strategy of the former USSR evolved from eradication to control"/>
<figcaption>The USSR plague strategy shifted from eradication to control.</figcaption>
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<ul>
<li>Jones, S.D. et al. (2019) <em><a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817339116">‘Living with plague: Lessons from the Soviet Union’s antiplague system’</a></em>, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(19), pp. 9155–9163.</li>
</ul>