Luis Escobar, Virginia Tech

Abstract

Most studies of diseases ecology are focused on population dynamics to understand transmission, with metapopulation models dominating the scene. A gap of knowledge is how infectious diseases may respond to coarse-scale changes in the communities of hosts, the landscape, or the climate. A new frontier in disease ecology is the exploration of the macroecology of infectious diseases. In this very brief presentation, I will explain the conceptual bases of macroecology, and will show an example of macroecology applied to an infectious disease. Finally, I will explain the multiple opportunities to study infectious diseases using theory and methods from this field.