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

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Biodiversity loss and emerging infectious disease are two of the most formidable scientific challenges for the next century. These phenomena are also inextricably linked: infectious diseases can drive biodiversity loss and shape ecological communities, while community diversity can regulate parasite transmission and infection risk. Hence, understanding the relationship between them is paramount, particularly given intensifying changes in biodiversity and species mixing associated with human activities. However, substantial uncertainty and even seemingly contradictory hypotheses have emerged regarding the direction, magnitude, and generality of the diversity-disease relationship. Resolving these disparate lines of research and developing a more predictive framework requires (i) a more mechanistic approach to understand the direct and indirect pathways through which diversity influences transmission and (ii) assessments of how such effects depend on parasite traits, community assembly, and scale. The central aim of this proposal is to integrate parameterized transmission models with field surveys, laboratory experiments, and whole-ecosystem manipulations to identify the mechanisms through which community diversity affects transmission and their relative importance across an entire guild of parasites (amphibian macroparasites).