98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

SYMP 2

Disease Ecology in Human-Altered Landscapes

Zoonotic and epizoonotic diseases pose serious threats to both human and ecosystem health across the globe. As such, recent decades have seen increasing interest in understanding, modeling, and predicting the spread and consequences of wildlife diseases. Today there are many emerging infectious diseases that include wildlife reservoirs within their transmission dynamics (e.g. Mycoplasma gallicepticum, West Nile virus, influenza, Nipah virus, etc.). Given the potential for increased interactions among humans, domestic animals, and wildlife in human-altered landscapes, this symposium focuses on how urban and otherwise disturbed environments influence transmission dynamics and spillover of diseases in and from wildlife. Specifically, we will address two of the most important and outstanding questions in urban disease ecology: 1) how susceptibility and transmission potential of hosts and vectors change in human-dominated landscapes, and 2) what role alterations to the biotic and abiotic environment plays in mediating these changes.