Collaborative Research: Linking social-environmental health to the trophic and disease dynamics of urban carnivores

在世界范围内，城市地区正在不断扩大，这对生物多样性保护提出了重大挑战，因为许多物种无法在这些人类主导的景观中生存。然而，一些物种确实在城市中存活下来，甚至茁壮成长，包括在生态系统中发挥关键作用的食肉动物。尽管城市食肉动物具有重要的生态和社会意义，但在了解城市内和城市间食肉动物数量变化的方式和原因方面，仍存在关键的知识空白。在这个项目中，研究人员假设，影响城市居民的环境健康差异同样会通过有毒物质、改变的饮食和疾病风险的共同作用影响食肉动物群体。更好地了解城市食肉动物的健康和疾病动态可以帮助预防未来的疾病爆发，因为食肉动物是许多感染人类的疾病的重要宿主。此外，城市食肉动物可以作为城市环境问题的早期预警哨兵，因为由于它们在食物网中的高位置，有毒物质和传染性病原体可以在它们的体内积聚。这项研究将提供见解，使城市规划者能够更好地预测解决社会不平等问题的措施将如何通过食肉动物影响城市生态系统。例如，该项目的研究结果将揭示诸如减少污染或增加绿地等行动应如何影响城市食肉动物的数量和健康。更好地了解城市食肉动物种群动态的驱动因素将促进快速城市化世界的生物多样性保护。研究人员提出，城市食肉动物种群动态主要受饮食、疾病流行和毒物暴露等环境健康异质性的影响。与野生地区相比，城市景观提供了人为补贴，从根本上改变了觅食行为的风险、回报和健康后果。饮食、毒物和传染病之间的这种新联系，可能会对城市食肉动物的种群动态产生强烈的影响，而当每一种力量被单独研究时，这种影响是无法预测的。研究人员将使用健康差异地图以及野生动物相机陷阱，食肉动物尸体尸体解剖，稳定同位素分析和美国西部三个主要大都市（西雅图-塔科马，旧金山湾区和洛杉矶）的粪便遗传分析来量化这些联系。由于饮食对城市地区有毒物质的暴露有很大影响，因此在对野生食肉动物的研究中，这些因素很难理清。因此，研究小组将通过对圈养的郊狼进行饮食试验，实验性地量化饮食对免疫功能的影响。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。

Urban areas are expanding worldwide, presenting a major challenge to biodiversity conservation because many species are unable to persist in these human-dominated landscapes. However, some species do persist and even thrive in cities, including carnivores that play critical roles in ecosystems. Despite the ecological and societal importance of urban carnivores, key knowledge gaps remain in understanding how and why their populations change within and across cities. In this project, the researchers hypothesize that the same environmental health disparities that affect people in cities likewise affect carnivore populations through the joint effects of toxicants, altered diets, and disease risk. A better understanding of the health and disease dynamics of urban carnivores could help to prevent future disease outbreaks, because carnivores are important hosts for many diseases that infect humans. Additionally, urban carnivores may serve as early warning sentinels of environmental problems in cities because toxicants and infectious agents can build up in their bodies due to their high position in the food web. This study will provide insights that will allow urban planners to better predict how measures taken to address societal inequities will affect urban ecosystems via carnivores. For example, the project’s findings will reveal how actions such as pollution reduction or increasing green space should affect the abundance and health of urban carnivores. A better understanding of factors driving carnivore population dynamics in cities will promote biodiversity conservation in a rapidly urbanizing world. The researchers propose that urban carnivore population dynamics are principally governed by heterogeneity in environmental health via impacts on diet, disease prevalence, and toxicant exposure. Urban landscapes offer anthropogenic subsidies that fundamentally alter the risk, reward, and health consequences of foraging behavior compared to wildland areas. These novel connections among diet, toxicants, and infectious disease may strongly affect the population dynamics of urban carnivores in ways that are not possible to predict when each force is examined separately. The researchers will use health disparity maps along with wildlife camera trapping, necropsies of carnivore carcasses, stable isotope analysis, and genetic analyses of scats across three major metropolitan areas in the western US (Seattle–Tacoma, San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles) to quantify these linkages. Because diet can strongly affect exposure to toxicants in urban areas, these factors are difficult to disentangle in studies of wild carnivores. The research team will therefore experimentally quantify the effect of diet on immune functioning by using diet trials with captive coyotes.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.