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是生态学领域的基础，也是预测全球变化时代动物种群稳定性的基础。这项研究的重点是脊椎动物最成功的病原体之一——一种对数百种两栖动物致命的皮肤真菌——以解决多面手病原体如何跨越栖息地和宿主物种的界限，有时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超级多样化的热带青蛙群落中设有实地地点。通过推进不同野生动物群落的疾病传播理论，本研究将为新发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。这些研究人员将与多媒体杂志《传记》合作，制作一个视频故事，详细介绍该团队在巴西研究的动机和进展，预计播放量将达到100万次。研究人员还将与加州科学院的教育部门合作，为K-12学生开发和传播一个介绍视频、课程计划和互动游戏，教授宿主-病原体动力学的概念，并展示科学家用来研究和模拟这些系统的工具。预计每年将有35000名K-12教师。我们的三层研究方法包括：1)跨旧世界和新世界热带地区的实地调查，以评估不同两栖动物群落的时空感染模式；2)实地实验，以分离气候变化对两栖动物群落结构和疾病风险的影响；3)结合观测和实验数据的疾病建模新方法，以预测群落尺度上的疾病动态和人口统计。我们综合方法的一个基石是检查全陆生两栖动物的疾病动态。这一热带蛙群正在经历着隐性的种群减少和灭绝，表面上与疾病、干旱、宿主行为的变化、空间聚集和病原体溢出有关。实地调查部分将比较共同发生的陆地繁殖和水生繁殖两栖动物物种之间的时空疾病动态，重点关注不同的宿主运动模式和对气候变化的响应。在巴西进行的实验将在大型野外围栏中操纵降雨变化，以测试关于寄主移动模式和陆生和水生繁殖落叶蛙感染动态的假设。实地调查和实验数据将整合到一个多宿主疾病建模框架内。该框架将应用最近开发的n -混合物模型，考虑不完善的宿主和病原体检测，以及贝叶斯种群活力分析，以预测未来气候情景下暴露于病原体的长期宿主种群稳定性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.