Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Health and agriculture sustainability through interdisciplinary surveillance and risk assessment platform of global emerging zoonotic diseases

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will establish transdisciplinary networks to develop innovative solutions for sustainable development pathways and seek to assess the positive and negative inter-linkages between the economy, technology, institutions with the environment, climate, biodiversity, and human well-being to understand potential pathways to a sustainable world.

The project aims to develop and build a platform to help understand and predict the transmission dynamics of important zoonotic diseases at the interface of ecology, wildlife and humans. The platform will integrate various tiers of databases and analytical approaches developed by diverse research studies to a single platform, allowing better accessibility to different regions of the world to help monitor and control disease outbreaks.

Eco2Health will specifically target avian influenza virus transmission in their platform development and will integrate several analytical tools from existing databases, including the following: a database generated by citizen scientist such as eBird or breeding bird survey with self-developed statistical package; a viral sequence from GenBank database or self-generated from local isolates; and local meteorological parameters and regional climate phenomenon database including El Nino-Southern Oscillation and Indian Ocean Dipole. Eco2Health will also generate an early warning system and risk map by combining different statistical/mathematical and machine-learning based approaches to better understand and predict transmission dynamics of avian influenza viruses over time and space.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.