Fig. 2: Projected ecological niche suitability of Mastomys natalensis and Lassa virus, as well as human population at risk of exposure to Lassa virus.

a Projected ecological niche suitability of Mastomys natalensis (M. natalensis) and Lassa virus for the current period, 2030, 2050, and 2070. Each future projection (i.e., for 2030, 2050, and 2070) was performed according to four different bias-adjusted global climate models and three different representative concentration pathways (RCPs), i.e., greenhouse gas concentration scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): RCP 2.6, RCP 6.0, and RCP 8.5. Here, we only report the projections obtained under RCP 6.0 (see Fig. S1 for the other scenarios as well as for the standard deviations associated with all projections, and see Fig. S2 for explicit differences between current and future projections). For a specific time period, we report ecological niche suitability averaged over the projections obtained with the four different climatic models (see the text for further detail). b Projections of the human population at risk of exposure to Lassa virus for the current period, 2030, 2050, and 2070. For those estimations, we also re-estimate these projections while fixing the human population, i.e., not using the future projections of human population to estimate the number of people at risk (see also Fig. S3 for spatially-explicit estimation of future human exposure to Lassa virus and Fig. S6 for the estimations of the human population at risk of exposure to Lassa virus under all RCP scenarios). Source data are provided as a Source Data file.