EID: Ecological Drivers of Rodent-borne Disease Outbreaks: Trophic Cascades and Dispersal Waves.

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Climate variability is thought to affect a number of rodent-borne zoonotic diseases such as plague, vector-borne zoonotic bartonellosis and hantaviral diseases. This project team will evaluate the Trophic Cascade Hypothesis (TCH), an hypothesis that was developed to explain changing levels of human risk for zoonotic diseases associated with climate variability in the U.S. Southwest. This study will (1) measure the responses of rodent food resources (plant cover and net primary production, nut/berry/acorn production, and ground-dwelling arthropod populations), rodent/vector reservoir abundance, and pathogen infection prevalences in rodents, to meteorological events (summer monsoons and El Nino - Southern Oscillation [ENSO] phenomena), (2) assess the usefulness of meteorological data and various remotely-sensed (satellite) imagery in accurately predicting these responses, and (3) develop spatially- and temporally-explicit models that characterize both demographic and population density changes with climate and ecosystem net primary production, as well as dispersal patterns and rates for several rodent species responsible for hantavirus, plague and Bartonella transmission. These models will serve more broadly as prototypes for more generalizable predictive models that may be applied to rodent-borne diseases in other ecosystems throughout the world. As global climate change continues to alter regional meteorological patterns, the models may prove useful in predicting range expansions of vector-borne diseases, thereby allowing appropriate planning and mitigation strategies to be implemented for public health enhancement.