Thursday, August 9, 2007: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM
A4&5, San Jose McEnery Convention Center
OOS 37 - Climate change and disease ecology: Challenges to the restoration and maintenance of suitable pestilence
Climate change has been implicated in the recent emergence of several infectious diseases, and climate often influences the spatial and temporal patterns of parasite abundance. It is also clear that parasites can influence the spatial and temporal patterns of host abundance. What does this mean for restoration ecology? From the perspective of parasites, restoration ecology is traditionally concerned with building a functional community of host species. And if we build these host communities, disease will come. In order for ecological restoration to succeed, effects of disease must be anticipated. Although restoration ecologists increasingly recognize parasites as important, if not target species in the restoration of ecological communities, predicting how disease will affect a target community is complicated by issues related to climate change. Long-term changes and short-term disruptions in climate will continue to alter the distribution and prevalence of infectious diseases. The frequency of short-term climatic disruptions appears to be rising. When these disruptions favor parasite growth or reduce host resistance, disease prevalence or virulence may rise. Changes in long-term climatic patterns should alter the spatial distribution of diseases, often accompanied by transient irruptions associated with the initial spread of parasites into new host communities. Predicting the ecological ramifications of climate change will require understanding the links between climate and disease ecology. This session will draw from several studies of emerging disease to illustrate the potential effects of climate on disease dynamics, and the array of methods available to forecast disease dynamics in a changing climate. Each speaker will discuss at least one relatively complex community in which climate change is likely to foment disease by altering host-host, host-vector, and/or host-parasite interactions. Speakers will also be asked to address ecological feedbacks that may temper climatic effects on disease. The goal of this session is to showcase how scientists discover relationships between climate, disease and community ecology, and how they forecast disease in ecological communities. This session also represents the first step in the effort to reach a wider audience: these topics will be developed further in a less technical book based on interviews with the researchers represented in this session plus other scientists and land managers working on these issues.
Organizer:Chris Ray, University of Colorado
Co-organizer:Sharon K. Collinge, University of Colorado
Moderator:Chris Ray, University of Colorado
8:00 AMOOS 37-1Ocean temperature anomalies as a driver of coral disease outbreaks
John Bruno, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ernesto Weil, University of Puerto Rico
8:20 AMOOS 37-2Amphibian population declines, disease, and climate change
Karen Lips, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Jay Diffendorfer, Illinois Natural History Survey, Joseph Mendelson III, Zoo Atlanta, Michael Sears, Southern Illinois University
8:40 AMOOS 37-3Plant disease and climate change: Perspectives from the genome and the ecosystem
Karen A. Garrett, Kansas State University
9:00 AMOOS 37-4Shifting patterns: Infectious disease dynamics in a changing world
Mercedes Pascual, University of Michigan, David Alonso, University of Michigan, Bernard Cazelles, CNRS-UMR, Ecole Normale Superieure
9:20 AMOOS 37-5Climate change and the zoonotic interface
Michael Begon, University of Liverpool
9:40 AM Break
9:50 AMOOS 37-6Dynamics of plague under climate variation in Central Asia
Nils Chr. Stenseth, University of Oslo
10:10 AMOOS 37-7Plague in prairie dog colonies under scenarios of climate change
Tord Snäll, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
10:30 AMOOS 37-8Lyme disease in a changing world: Where public health and ecology meet
Nicholas Ogden, Public Health Agency of Canada

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