Collaborative Research: Linking Host Life History, Movement Ecology, and Climate to Predict Epizootics in Megadiverse Tropical Amphibian Communities

了解疾病在野生动物群落中的传播对于生态学领域和预测全球变化时代动物种群的稳定性是至关重要的。这项研究的重点是脊椎动物最成功的病原体之一--一种对数百个两栖物种致命的皮肤真菌--以解决通用性病原体如何跨越生境和宿主物种的边界，有时会影响整个生态系统和流域。该项目是全球性的，在巴西、秘鲁和喀麦隆的三个种类繁多的热带青蛙群落中设有野外地点。通过推进不同野生动物群落的疾病传播理论，这项研究将为新出现的疾病的影响提供新的见解，并提高我们预测和应对疾病爆发的能力。研究人员将与多媒体杂志《传记》合作，制作一段视频故事，详细介绍该团队在巴西的研究动机和进展，预计点击量将达到100万次。研究人员还将与加州科学院教育部门合作，为K-12观众开发和传播介绍性视频、教案和互动游戏，教授宿主-病原体动力学的概念，并展示科学家用于研究和模拟这些系统的工具。预计每年将有35,000名K-12教师。我们的三级研究方法包括1)跨越旧世界和新世界热带的实地调查，以评估不同两栖动物群落的感染模式，跨越空间和时间；2)实地实验，分离气候变化对两栖动物群落结构和疾病风险的影响；以及3)新的疾病建模方法，整合观察和实验数据，以预测社区规模的疾病动态和人口统计。我们综合方法的一个基石是研究全陆生两栖动物的疾病动态。这一热带青蛙协会一直在经历神秘的种群数量下降和灭绝，表面上与疾病、干旱、宿主行为的转变、空间聚集和病原体溢出有关。实地调查部分将比较共存的陆生和水生两栖动物物种之间的时空疾病动态，重点是不同的寄主运动模式和对气候变化的反应。巴西的这项实验将操纵大规模田间围栏中的降雨量变化，以测试关于寄主运动模式和陆生和水生繁殖的落叶蛙感染动力学的假设。实地调查和实验数据将整合在一个多宿主疾病建模框架内。该框架将应用最近开发的N混合模型来解释不完美的宿主和病原体检测，以及贝叶斯种群生存分析，以预测在未来气候情景下暴露于病原体的长期宿主种群稳定性。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Understanding the spread of diseases in wildlife communities is fundamental to the field of ecology and to predicting the stability of animal populations in an era of global change. This research focuses on one of the most successful pathogens of vertebrates - a skin fungus that is lethal to hundreds of amphibian species - to resolve how generalist pathogens cross habitat and host species boundaries, at times impacting entire ecosystems and watersheds. The project is global in scope, with field sites in three megadiverse tropical frog communities in Brazil, Peru, and Cameroon. By advancing disease transmission theory for diverse wildlife communities, this research will provide novel insights into impacts of emerging diseases and increase our capacity to forecast and respond to disease outbreaks. The researchers will work with the multimedia magazine bioGraphic to produce a video story detailing the motivation and progress of the team’s research in Brazil, with an expected reach of 1 million views. The researchers will also work with the education department at the California Academy of Sciences to develop and disseminate an introductory video, lesson plan, and interactive game for K-12 audiences that teach the concepts of host-pathogen dynamics and showcase the tools scientists use to study and model these systems. The projected reach is 35,000 K-12 teachers per year.Our three-tiered research approach includes 1) field surveys spanning the old world and new world tropics to assess infection patterns in diverse amphibian communities across space and time, 2) a field experiment to isolate the effects of climatic variability on amphibian community structure and disease risk, and 3) novel methods of disease modelling that integrate observational and experimental data to forecast disease dynamics and population demographics at the community scale. A cornerstone of our integrative approach is to examine the disease dynamics of fully terrestrial amphibians. This guild of tropical frogs has been experiencing cryptic population declines and extinctions ostensibly linked to disease, droughts, shifts in host behavior, spatial aggregation, and pathogen spillover. The field survey component will compare spatiotemporal disease dynamics among co-occurring terrestrial-breeding and aquatic-breeding amphibian species, focusing on divergent host movement patterns and responses to climatic variability. The experiment in Brazil will manipulate rainfall variability in large-scale field enclosures to test hypotheses on host movement patterns and infection dynamics of terrestrial- and aquatic-breeding leaf litter frogs. Field surveys and experimental data will be integrated within a multi-host disease modeling framework. This framework will apply recently developed N-mixture models accounting for imperfect host and pathogen detection, together with a Bayesian population viability analysis, to predict long-term host population stability exposed to pathogens under future climate scenarios.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.