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？

基本信息

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

项目摘要

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) 的重要信息，有助于提高每年数十万国家公园游客的安全，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、汉坦病毒病、西尼罗河病、狂犬病、弓形体病）都是人畜共患疾病，即以动物为主要宿主的疾病。因此，了解控制动物疾病流行的生态力量对于了解人类疾病风险非常重要。然而，预测疾病流行率可能很困难，因为动物种群的规模可能受到捕食者和资源可用性（例如动物可用食物量）的影响。了解捕食者和资源可用性如何相互作用以影响宿主种群可能会因极端气候事件而变得更加复杂，在未来的气候情景下，极端气候事件可能会变得更加常见，因为气候（例如年降水量）通常决定资源可用性。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影响的性质。尽管了解捕食者和气候如何影响疾病很重要，但此类研究具有挑战性，因为很少能确切地了解捕食者，而且极端气候事件可能发生得如此之快，以至于很难对其进行研究。该研究项目将使用已知捕食者多样性的多个岛屿生态系统，提供前所未有的机会来了解极端气候事件和捕食者多样性如何影响辛名病毒（SNV）的流行，这种病毒会导致汉坦病毒肺综合征，这是一种严重的人类疾病。具体来说，这项研究需要测量加利福尼亚海峡群岛的鹿鼠在一场比过去 500 年来最严重的干旱期间和之后的 SNV 流行率。这些数据，特别是与现有的干旱前数据相结合时，提供了一个难得的机会来了解极端气候事件和捕食者之间的相互作用对疾病大规模流行的影响，也提供了一个机会来评估捕食者多样性减少的新假设动物种群中疾病流行率反弹的速度。