Quantifying intra‐ and inter‐species contact rates at supplemental feeding sites in Ethiopia to inform rabies maintenance potential of multiple host species

Rabies, a multi‐host pathogen responsible for the loss of roughly 59,000 human lives each year worldwide, continues to impose a significant burden of disease despite control efforts, especially in Ethiopia. However, how species other than dogs contribute to rabies transmission throughout Ethiopia remains largely unknown. In this study, we quantified interactions among wildlife species in Ethiopia with the greatest potential for contributing to rabies maintenance. We observed wildlife at supplemental scavenging sites across multiple landscape types and quantified transmission potential. More specifically, we used camera trap data to quantify species abundance, species distribution, and intra‐ and inter‐species contacts per trapping night over time and by location. We derived a mathematical expression for the basic reproductive number (R0) based on within‐ and between‐species contract rates by applying the next generation method to the susceptible, exposed, infectious, removed model. We calculated R0 for transmission within each species and between each pair of species using camera trap data in order to identify pairwise interactions that contributed the most to transmission in an ecological community. We estimated which species, or species pairs, could maintain transmission (R0>1${R_0} > 1$) and which species, or species pairs, had contact rates too low for maintenance (R0