Figure 4
Malaria transmission in the Amazon rainforest. (A) Selected municipalities for estimating malarial exposure risk, forest cover and deforestation timeline at a fine scale (5 km2). These municipalities are characterized by a wet and a dry season with wet-dry transition months (mean annual rainfall > 2000 mm; mean annual temperature ~ 26 °C). The rural and peri-urban communities studied in these municipalities were selected as representative of areas with moderate or high malaria transmission. (B) Two 5-km2 sampling units are illustrated as examples. They are in the agricultural settlement of Pentecostes in the municipality of Mâncio Lima, Acre state. Inside each unit, the exact geographic points of mosquito collection in the peridomestic environment and on the forest edge are shown. Both sampling units were considered preserved sites and were selected for mosquito sampling during field collections performed in May 2015. As an example of how high the malarial exposure risk was, one of the collectors was infected by P. falciparum via a Ny. darlingi female in one of these sampling units. This RGB composite imagery was created by the first author (GZL) working with ArcGIS v. 10.3.1 and data from publicly available sources (USGS, Landsat Project, WWF, INPE).
