Urban Snake Displacement Risk Index

Rapid urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America is
systematically destroying snake habitat and forcing species into human settlements,
contributing to tens of thousands of snakebite deaths annually. Despite this documented crisis, no standardized quantitative tool exists to measure the underlying displacement pressure driving these encounters. This paper introduces the Urban
Snake Displacement Risk Index (USDRI), a reproducible composite framework that
aggregates four independently documented displacement mechanisms—sighting density, habitat loss, urban expansion, and urban proximity—into a single score from 0 to 100, classified into four actionable risk bands. Each component is normalized to
an equal 0–25 range and summed to produce the final index, ensuring transparency and reproducibility without requiring empirically unjustified weighting assumptions The framework is implemented as Boseman, an urban snake displacement search engine that retrieves real occurrence data from iNaturalist and GBIF, satellite habitat data from Google Earth Engine, urban land cover data from the Copernicus Urban Atlas, and geocoding from OpenStreetMap Nominatim, computing USDRI scores in real time for any geographic query. Simulated illustrative analysis across six cities Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Mumbai, Bangkok, and São Paulo demonstrates that the framework produces differentiated scores corresponding to known urbanization and conflict patterns. USDRI fills a documented methodological gap in conservation science and urban public health by providing, for the first time, a quantitative tool that answers not only where snakes are appearing but why they are appearing and
how serious the underlying pressure driving those appearances is