RAPID: Do extreme climatic events and predator diversity interact to shape the biogeography of disease?

RAPID：极端气候事件和捕食者多样性是否相互作用来塑造疾病的生物地理学？

• 批准号: 1439550
• 负责人: John Orrock
• 金额: $ 8.36万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-07-01 至 2018-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1439550&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RAPID; Do; extreme; climatic; events; RAPID; Do; extreme; climatic; events

This research will provide critical information on the Sin Nombre Virus (SNV) that can help improve the safety of hundreds of thousands of National Park visitors each year, as well as involve two graduate students and a postdoctoral scientist. Many diseases that affect humans (e.g. Lyme disease, hantaviruses, West Nile disease, rabies, toxoplasmosis) are zoonotic diseases, i.e. diseases where an animal is the primary host for the disease. As a result, understanding the ecological forces that govern the prevalence of disease in animals is very important for understanding human disease risk. However, predicting disease prevalence can be difficult because the size of animal populations is likely affected by both predators and by resource availability (e.g. the amount of food available for animals). Understanding how predators and resource availability interact to affect host populations may be further complicated by extreme climatic events that may become more common under future climate scenarios, since climate (e.g. the amount of annual precipitation) often determines resource availability. In addition, human activities are changing the worldwide distribution of top predators, likely affecting the nature of predator effects on animal populations. Despite the importance of understanding how predators and climate shape disease, such research is challenging because predators are rarely known with certainty, and because extreme climatic events may occur so rapidly that it is difficult to study them. This research project will use multiple island ecosystems where predator diversity is known, providing an unprecedented opportunity to understand how extreme climatic events and predator diversity affect the prevalence of Sin Nombre Virus (SNV), which causes hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, a severe disease in humans. Specifically, this research entails measuring SNV prevalence in deer mice on the California Channel Islands during and after a drought more severe than any drought in the last 500 years. These data, especially when coupled with existing pre-drought data, provide a rare opportunity to understand the interplay between extreme climatic events and predators in affecting large-scale prevalence of disease, and also provides an opportunity to evaluate the novel hypothesis that predator diversity reduces the rate at which disease prevalence rebounds in animal populations.

这项研究将提供有关Sin Nombre病毒（SNV）的关键信息，这些信息可以帮助提高每年数十万个国家公园游客的安全性，并涉及两名研究生和一名博士后科学家。许多影响人类的疾病（例如莱姆病，汉坦病毒，西尼罗河疾病，狂犬病，弓形虫病）是人畜共患病，即动物是该疾病主要宿主的疾病。 结果，了解控制动物疾病患病率的生态力量对于理解人类疾病风险非常重要。但是，预测疾病患病率可能很困难，因为动物种群的大小可能受到捕食者和资源可用性的影响（例如，动物可用的食物量）。了解捕食者和资源可用性如何相互作用以影响寄主人群可能会因极端气候事件而更加复杂，而极端气候事件可能会在未来的气候场景下变得更加普遍，因为气候（例如，年降水量）通常决定了资源可用性。此外，人类活动正在改变顶级捕食者的全球分布，可能会影响捕食者对动物种群的影响的性质。尽管重要的是了解捕食者和气候形状疾病如何，但这种研究却是具有挑战性的，因为捕食者很少确定地知道，并且由于极端气候事件的发生可能如此迅速，因此很难研究它们。该研究项目将使用多个岛屿生态系统，在这些生态系统中，捕食者的多样性是已知的，这提供了前所未有的机会，以了解极端的气候事件和捕食者的多样性如何影响罪恶的nombre病毒（SNV）的普遍性，这会导致汉塔病毒肺综合症，这是一种严重的人类疾病。具体而言，这项研究需要在干旱期间和之后测量比过去500年中任何干旱更为严重的鹿小鼠的SNV患病率。这些数据，尤其是当与现有的干旱前数据相结合时，提供了一个难得的机会，可以理解极端气候事件与捕食者之间在影响大规模疾病患病率方面之间的相互作用，并且还提供了一个机会，可以评估捕食者多样性降低动物种群中疾病患病率的率。