Environmental pathogen reservoirs exist for many globally important diseases and can fuel epidemics, influence pathogen evolution, and increase the threat of host extinction. Species composition can be an important factor that shapes reservoir dynamics and ultimately determines the outcome of a disease outbreak. However, disease-induced mortality can change species communities, indicating that species responsible for environmental reservoir maintenance may change over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDemographic factors are fundamental in shaping infectious disease dynamics. Aspects of populations that create structure, like age and sex, can affect patterns of transmission, infection intensity and population outcomes. However, studies rarely link these processes from individual to population-scale effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding host persistence with emerging pathogens is essential for conserving populations. Hosts may initially survive pathogen invasions through pre-adaptive mechanisms. However, whether pre-adaptive traits are directionally selected to increase in frequency depends on the heritability and environmental dependence of the trait and the costs of trait maintenance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging infectious diseases can have devastating effects on host communities, causing population collapse and species extinctions. The timing of novel pathogen arrival into naïve species communities can have consequential effects that shape the trajectory of epidemics through populations. Pathogen introductions are often presumed to occur when hosts are highly mobile.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Fig. 3d this Letter, the R value should have been '0.19' instead of '0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnderstanding host interactions that lead to pathogen transmission is fundamental to the prediction and control of epidemics. Although the majority of transmissions often occurs within social groups, the contribution of connections that bridge groups and species to pathogen dynamics is poorly understood. These cryptic connections-which are often indirect or infrequent-provide transmission routes between otherwise disconnected individuals and may have a key role in large-scale outbreaks that span multiple populations or species.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is common to use multiple field sampling methods when implementing wildlife surveys to compare method efficacy or cost efficiency, integrate distinct pieces of information provided by separate methods, or evaluate method-specific biases and misclassification error. Existing models that combine information from multiple field methods or sampling devices permit rigorous comparison of method-specific detection parameters, enable estimation of additional parameters such as false-positive detection probability, and improve occurrence or abundance estimates, but with the assumption that the separate sampling methods produce detections independently of one another. This assumption is tenuous if methods are paired or deployed in close proximity simultaneously, a common practice that reduces the additional effort required to implement multiple methods and reduces the risk that differences between method-specific detection parameters are confounded by other environmental factors.
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