“…Studies employing ecological niche modelling in spatial epidemiology routinely use the Maxent software package, exposing a presence-only-based species distribution model (Phillips, Anderson, and Schapire 2006), to predict potential distribution for a multitude of diseases, including flu outbreak risk in California, US. (Belkhiria et al, 2018), Chagas disease in Brazil (Costa et al 2014), and malaria in Zimbabwe (Gwitira et al 2015). Maxent is a software package which operationalizes a modelling approach often used for estimating habitat suitability, species distribution and the probability of occurrence given presence-only data and environmental (climatic) variables in coordinate space (Elith et al 2011;Phillips, Anderson, and Schapire 2006;Merow, Smith, and Silander 2013).…”