Host availability, climate and pupal-stage ecology shape the predicted environmental suitability of the New World screwworm across Central and South America

Cochliomyia hominivorax predicted relative environmental suitability across Central and South America rises to AUC 0.918 when livestock, forest cover, and superficial soil properties are included.

• Why it matters: Spatial tools are needed to locate environmentally suitable areas and surveillance gaps after the species’ resurgence in Central America, but prior models rarely included pupal-stage ecological constraints.
• What they did: Using 2,461 georeferenced occurrence reports linked to climate, livestock density, forest cover, and superficial soil predictors, nested logistic models and Random Forest were compared with five-fold spatial block cross-validation and an independent municipality-level 70:30 split.
• The result: Random Forest was more stable than GLM under spatial block cross-validation (mean AUC 0.926 ± 0.049 vs 0.814 ± 0.157) and reached AUC 0.981 on the independent test set, with highest suitability across Central America and parts of northern and tropical South America.

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