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Towards an eco-phylogenetic framework for infectious disease ecology.

Nicholas M Fountain-JonesWilliam D PearseLuis E EscobarAna Alba-CasalsScott CarverT Jonathan DaviesSimona KrabergerMonica PapeşKurt VandegriftKatherine Worsley-TonksMeggan E Craft
Published in: Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (2017)
Identifying patterns and drivers of infectious disease dynamics across multiple scales is a fundamental challenge for modern science. There is growing awareness that it is necessary to incorporate multi-host and/or multi-parasite interactions to understand and predict current and future disease threats better, and new tools are needed to help address this task. Eco-phylogenetics (phylogenetic community ecology) provides one avenue for exploring multi-host multi-parasite systems, yet the incorporation of eco-phylogenetic concepts and methods into studies of host pathogen dynamics has lagged behind. Eco-phylogenetics is a transformative approach that uses evolutionary history to infer present-day dynamics. Here, we present an eco-phylogenetic framework to reveal insights into parasite communities and infectious disease dynamics across spatial and temporal scales. We illustrate how eco-phylogenetic methods can help untangle the mechanisms of host-parasite dynamics from individual (e.g. co-infection) to landscape scales (e.g. parasite/host community structure). An improved ecological understanding of multi-host and multi-pathogen dynamics across scales will increase our ability to predict disease threats.
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