Anthropogenic ecosystem disturbances play an important role in the distribution of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Advances in GIS, remote sensing technologies, and spatial statistical methods facilitate the observation and quantification of anthropogenic landscape disturbances, providing the tools necessary to link these disturbances to disease emergence. Investigations into disturbances linked to environmental bacterial infections are an underrepresented research area. One such disease is Buruli ulcer disease (BU), caused by the environmental pathogen Mycobacterium ulcerans. The ecological drivers behind pathogen proliferation and transmission to humans are currently unknown. The main objective of this study included using a spatial landscape ecological approach to determine whether land cover patches indicative of anthropogenic landscape disturbances surrounded villages with higher BU rates. Landscape-level results supported study hypotheses that more fragmented landscapes, with more uniform land cover patch shapes, lying within areas more likely to collect water surround villages with higher BU rates, but results were not consistent. Class-level results, analyzing forest, wetland, and a mixed agriculture/forest class, suggested that more aggregated patches with more complex shapes surround villages with higher BU rates. Incorporation of a spatial random effects component accounted for spatial autocorrelation and provided a spatial structure from which to predict BU rates at unsampled locations.
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