Abstract
West Nile (WNV) is a zoonotic mosquito-borne virus with an expanding geographical and epidemic activity worldwide. Computational studies have contributed to the understanding of factors driving WNV occurrence, particularly in North America and Europe. Archipelagos have largely been overlooked, despite the risk to unique local avian species and human populations. In this study, we apply an ecological niche approach, trained on WNV occurrence and (a)biotic factors from European countries to project ecological suitability for WNV occurrence across several Atlantic archipelagos. The approach gives weight to the temporal dimension, generating novel insights on seasonality both for Europe and the archipelagos. For European countries, modelling results align with previous findings on spatial hotspots and (a)biotic drivers of WNV occurrence, while further unravelling properties of at-risk human populations within dynamically suitable land areas. For Atlantic archipelagos, results constitute a novel and detailed perspective on local ecological suitability for WNV occurrence, providing a data-driven framework that identifies spatial hotspots, defines seasonal patterns and quantifies the local population at risk. The synthetic data generated in this study supports the development of targeted preparedness, surveillance and mitigation plans tailored to the unique ecological and seasonal dynamics of each region under study.
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Data availability
Ecological suitability for WNV occurrence is made available within a Figshare repository (DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7697918) in GeoTiff format (.tif), which is compatible with the Terra R-package73. The most efficient way to access these resources in Figshare is to search by title “GeoTiffs with estimates of ecological suitability for WNV occurrence for regions stated in the filenames”. Curated WNV occurrence data is also provided in the same Figshare repository. The most efficient way to access these resources in Figshare is to search by title “CSVs with curated WNV occurrence records for Spain, Portugal and Italy”. Data otherwise presented in Figures is provided in table format in Supplementary Data. Input data is not made directly available due to resharing restrictions but all data is freely accessible on the cited repositories (see Table S2).
Code availability
Code template (in R) for the ensemble, machine learning pipeline is provided in Supplementary Code File.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) in the scope of institutional support from FCT to CE3C (DOI:10.54499/UIDB/00329/2020, UID/00329/2025), BioISI (DOI:10.54499/UIDB/04046/2020, UID/04046/2025), CHANGE (LA/P/0121/2020), and CBR (DOI:10.54499/UID/06497/2025, UID/06497/2025). We acknowledge Colégio Tropical (CTROP) from the University of Lisbon for supporting a WNV research initiative in São Tomé linked to this work. MVC acknowledges institutional support from FCT (DOI:10.54499/CEECINST/00032/2018/CP1523/CT0005).
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M.A.G.: Data Curation, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing. J.L.: Data Curation, Resources, Methodology, Conceptualisation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision. M.G.: Conceptualisation, Investigation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision. M.V.C.: Resources, Conceptualisation, Investigation, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision.
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Geraldes, M.A., Giovanetti, M., Cunha, M.V. et al. Land and climate suitability for West Nile virus in Atlantic archipelagos guided by historical data from Europe. Commun Biol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-09410-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-09410-z


