US-UK Collaboration: Integrating ecology, epidemiology, and human interests to guide strategic management of zoonoses in complex wildlife reservoirs

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Wild animals host a wide variety of pathogens that can spread to other animals and humans. Suchdiseases, including Ebola and COVID-19, significantly affect human health, agriculture and wildlifeconservation. Historically, disease control methods (e.g. vaccination, therapeutics) have focused onhumans or livestock rather than wild animal reservoirs. Focusing on disease control in wildlife couldbe more effective in preventing disease emergence in humans, but that approach is currently limitedby three factors. First, many diseases are maintained in cycles that spread across landscapes, butwildlife diseases are notoriously difficult to assess at these large spatial scales, making responses tointerventions unpredictable. Second, tools like vaccines have been difficult to administer to sufficientnumbers of animals to actually reduce disease transmission in the wild. Third, interventions areusually bounded by societal constraints, both financial (e.g., limited funds to invest) and sociological(e.g., conflicting stakeholder interests). New technologies, including vaccines that can spread amongwildlife and miniaturized animal-borne tracking systems, have unrealized potential to overcome theselimitations. This project will focus on reducing vampire bat transmitted rabies, which has significanthuman health and agricultural impacts across Latin America, but the methods developed for this studycould be applied to other important wildlife diseases. The project will strengthen researchcapacity through training of students and early career scientists in field, laboratory and quantitative methodologies.This project will conduct field and laboratory research to test specific hypotheses about theepidemiology and management of vampire bat-transmitted rabies. The researchers will: (1) Use fieldexperiments with animal-borne GPS tags and large-scale data on bat presence from questionnairesand historical rabies outbreaks to generate models that can be used to determine how humandisturbance influences bat abundance and dispersal; (2) Conduct studies using captive and wildvampire bats to determine host and ecological factors that will influence the use of self-spreadingrabies vaccines that target bats; and (3) Use parameters estimated from fieldwork and captive studiesto optimize strategies for localized control and regional elimination of vampire bat rabies that preservediverse stakeholder requirements, e.g. wildlife conservation goals as well as improved human andlivestock health.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.