NSFDEB-NERC: Diversity and disease: uniting community and disease ecology to understand how biodiversity affects parasite transmission

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Over the next century, two of the most pressing environmental threats will be the ongoing losses of biodiversity and the increased emergence of infectious diseases. Key challenges are to understand how these issues are related and to identify strategies for reducing their effects on human and wildlife populations. For instance, growing evidence suggests that the diversity of organisms found in natural habitats can affect how fast pathogens spread, including those that cause illness in humans. This research will investigate how changes in species diversity affect the risk of infection and disease in a threatened group of wildlife: amphibians. Researchers from the USA and the United Kingdom will work together to better understand how diversity influences pathogen transmission, using mechanistic models of infection fit to data from field observations, laboratory experiments, and whole-system manipulations. Results of the research will be used to assist natural resource managers to conserve threatened amphibian populations and to develop an interactive exhibit at the University of Colorado Natural History Museum which will engage elementary and middle school students. The project will also provide opportunities for broadening participation in science by involving undergraduate and graduate students. This proposal applies tools and concepts from community ecology to test the foundational relationships between biological diversity and parasite infection. Building upon extensive previous research by the investigators, data from (i) wetland surveys will be used to understand how communities of amphibians (frogs, toads, and salamanders) and infectious parasites change along a gradient in biodiversity. Field data will be combined with results from (ii) laboratory experiments that test alternative mechanisms through which biodiversity might affect infections to develop (iii) predictive models that forecast the influence of each mechanism on disease risk. Finally, model predictions will be tested and refined using a (iv) real-world experiment in which the presence and abundance of an influential host species is altered across a natural richness gradient. Results will be compared among parasite species that differ in the amount of disease they cause in amphibian hosts. The integration of wetland surveys, multi-scale experiments, and predictive modeling will fill a key knowledge gap by assessing the functional relationships between biodiversity and parasite transmission, which are difficult to discern from strictly observational data or studies of a single host or parasite species. These efforts will help resolve ongoing debates about the diversity-disease relationship and build a more comprehensive understanding of how changes in ecological communities interact to influence disease risk. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.