Forecasting parasite sharing under climate change

Morales-Castilla, I., Pappalardo, P., Farrell, M. J. , Aguirre, A. A., Huang, S., Gehman, A.-L. M., Dallas, T., Gravel, D. and Davies, T. J. (2021) Forecasting parasite sharing under climate change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1837), 20200360. (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0360) (PMID:34538143) (PMCID:PMC8450630)

Abstract

Species are shifting their distributions in response to climate change. This geographic reshuffling may result in novel co-occurrences among species, which could lead to unseen biotic interactions, including the exchange of parasites between previously isolated hosts. Identifying potential new host–parasite interactions would improve forecasting of disease emergence and inform proactive disease surveillance. However, accurate predictions of future cross-species disease transmission have been hampered by the lack of a generalized approach and data availability. Here, we propose a framework to predict novel host–parasite interactions based on a combination of niche modelling of future host distributions and parasite sharing models. Using the North American ungulates as a proof of concept, we show this approach has high cross-validation accuracy in over 85% of modelled parasites and find that more than 34% of the host–parasite associations forecasted by our models have already been recorded in the literature. We discuss potential sources of uncertainty and bias that may affect our results and similar forecasting approaches, and propose pathways to generate increasingly accurate predictions. Our results indicate that forecasting parasite sharing in response to shifts in host geographic distributions allow for the identification of regions and taxa most susceptible to emergent pathogens under climate change. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Infectious disease macroecology: parasite diversity and dynamics across the globe’.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The authors thank the Macroecology of Infectious Disease Research Coordination Network, funded by NSF (grant no. DEB 1316223), for facilitating discussion among the authors. I.M.C. acknowledges funding from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (grant no. PID2019-109711RJ-I00 to I.M.C., grant CGL2017-86926-P to M.Á.R.) as well as from Comunidad de Madrid and University of Alcalá (funders of I.F.W. through grant CM/BG/2021-003 to I.M.C.). S.H. was supported by the German Science Foundation (grant no. DFG, HU 2748/1-1).
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Farrell, Dr Maxwell
• Authors: Morales-Castilla, I., Pappalardo, P., Farrell, M. J., Aguirre, A. A., Huang, S., Gehman, A.-L. M., Dallas, T., Gravel, D., and Davies, T. J.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine
• Journal Name: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
• Publisher: The Royal Society
• ISSN: 0962-8436
• ISSN (Online): 1471-2970
• Published Online: 20 September 2021