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

城市地区正在全球范围内扩张，这对生物多样性保护构成了重大挑战，因为许多物种无法在这些人类主导的景观中生存下去。然而，一些物种确实在城市中生存下来，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。尽管城市食肉动物在生态和社会上具有重要意义，但在理解它们的种群如何以及为什么在城市内部和城市之间变化方面，关键的知识差距仍然存在。在这个项目中，研究人员假设，影响城市居民的环境健康差距同样会通过毒物、改变饮食和疾病风险的共同作用影响食肉动物种群。更好地了解城市食肉动物的健康和疾病动态可能有助于防止未来的疾病爆发，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，因为毒物和传染性物质可能会在它们的体内积聚，因为它们在食物网中的位置很高。这项研究将提供洞察力，使城市规划者能够更好地预测为解决社会不平等问题而采取的措施将如何通过食肉动物影响城市生态系统。例如，该项目的发现将揭示减少污染或增加绿地等行动应该如何影响城市食肉动物的数量和健康。更好地了解推动城市食肉动物种群动态的因素，将促进在快速城市化的世界中保护生物多样性。研究人员认为，城市食肉动物的种群动态主要是由环境健康的异质性通过影响饮食、疾病流行和毒物暴露来控制的。城市景观提供人为补贴，与荒野地区相比，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些新的联系可能会以一种无法预测的方式强烈地影响城市食肉动物的种群动态，当单独检查每种力量时。研究人员将使用健康差距图、野生动物摄像头捕捉、食肉动物身体解剖、稳定同位素分析以及对美国西部三个主要大都市地区(西雅图-塔科马、旧金山湾区和洛杉矶)的SCAT基因分析来量化这些联系。由于饮食会强烈影响城市地区的毒物暴露，在对野生食肉动物的研究中，这些因素很难分离出来。因此，研究小组将通过对圈养郊狼进行饮食试验来实验量化饮食对免疫功能的影响。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。

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.