Effects of environmental change on zoonotic disease risk: an ecological primer

• Published in: Trends in parasitology Vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 205 - 214
• Main Authors: Estrada-Peña, Agustín, Ostfeld, Richard S., Peterson, A. Townsend, Poulin, Robert, de la Fuente, José
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.04.2014
• Subjects: abiotic niche; Animals; biotic factors; Climate Change; disease transmission; dispersal behavior; Ecology; Environment; environmental factors; Gastroenterology and Hepatology; Host-Pathogen Interactions; hosts; Humans; Infectious Disease; interspecific transfer barrier; pathogens; risk; Risk Assessment; zoonoses; Zoonoses - epidemiology; Zoonoses - transmission; zoonotic diseases; abiotic niche; biotic factors; interspecific transfer barrier; zoonotic diseases
• ISSN: 1471-4922; 1471-5007; 1471-5007
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pt.2014.02.003

•Distributional ecology applied to free-living organisms is underused for zoonotic systems.•Abiotic factors can affect human behaviours independent of impacts on disease risk.•Abiotic and biotic drivers of pathogen host-switching require integration.•Vectors, pathogens, and hosts overlap at a hierarchy of scales, affecting disease risk. Impacts of environmental changes on zoonotic disease risk are the subject of speculation, but lack a coherent framework for understanding environmental drivers of pathogen transmission from animal hosts to humans. We review how environmental factors affect the distributions of zoonotic agents and their transmission to humans, exploring the roles they play in zoonotic systems. We demonstrate the importance of capturing the distributional ecology of any species involved in pathogen transmission, defining the environmental conditions required, and the projection of that niche onto geography. We further review how environmental changes may alter the dispersal behaviour of populations of any component of zoonotic disease systems. Such changes can modify relative importance of different host species for pathogens, modifying contact rates with humans.