Organized Oral Session
Stephanie Hurd
PhD Candidate
University of Maine, United States
Allison Gardner
Associate Professor
University of Maine, United States
Pathogens transmitted by arthropods pose significant threats to public health on the global scale. For example, malaria was responsible for 627,000 deaths worldwide in 2020, despite significant advances in household mosquito control within recent decades, and Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States. Ecological processes across spatial scales (from microhabitat to landscape) influence vector life history traits and vector-host interactions with consequences for pathogen transmission. Landscape scale drivers, like land use change, can influence vector life cycles and, consequently, human disease risk. Land use change is a significant anthropogenic force that shapes the landscape, with consequences for disease systems. While there are correlations between land use change and vector-borne disease or pathogen transmission in many systems (e.g., deforestation and increases in malaria cases, forest fragmentation and increases in tick densities yet decreases in human incidence of Lyme disease), the underlying ecological mechanisms that explain these patterns are complex and understudied, and studies may even produce contradictory results. Understanding the cause of such equivocal results and elucidating the underlying mechanisms is important to our knowledge of vector-borne ecology because it allows us to identify drivers of vector-borne pathogen transmission and provides the opportunity to interrupt these processes to mitigate disease spread. < br>We propose an Organized Oral Session for the ESA meeting in Portland to highlight key open questions in landscape vector-borne ecology, the potential causes of ambiguous results, the inherent challenges in resolving such ambiguity, and ongoing endeavors to do so. Speaker topics for the proposed symposium include effects of agricultural land use on West Nile virus, distinguishing between forest fragmentation metrics and their impacts on entomological risk, vector surveillance in a low-incidence state, influence of transmission mode on pathogen distribution, and the effects of wildlife movement on the cattle fever tick. < br>Our proposed symposium emphasizes the ESA meeting theme of “ESA For All Ecologists” by inviting speakers that come from diverse professional backgrounds, who currently work in academia or a management agency or have experience working in the private and public sector. Participants span career stages, connecting both academic and non-academic ecologists. We believe this symposium will engage ecologists with interests in disease ecology, landscape ecology, and community and ecosystem ecology, and encourage conversations between those generating data and those implementing data-informed management tools to control vector-borne disease.
Presenting Author: Stephanie Hurd – University of Maine
Co-author: Allison Gardner – University of Maine
Presenting Author: Elizabeth Dykstra, PhD, BCE – Washington State Department of Health
Presenting Author: Andrew MacDonald – University of California, Santa Barbara
Presenting Author: Erin Mordecai – Stanford University
Co-author: Eloise B. Skinner – Stanford University
Co-author: Caroline K. Glidden – Stanford University
Co-author: Andrew MacDonald – University of California, Santa Barbara
Co-author: Aisling Murran – Stanford University
Co-author: Rafaella Albuquerque Silva – Ministry of Health, Brazil
Co-author: Adrian A. Castellanos – Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Co-author: Barbara Han – Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Co-author: Gowri Vadmal – Stanford University
Co-author: Bruno Carvalho – Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Presenting Author: Vera W. Pfeiffer – Washington State University
Co-author: Javier Gutierrez Illan – Washington State University
Co-author: Massaro W. Ueti – USDA-ARS
Co-author: Karen C. Poh – USDA-ARS
Presenting Author: Andrea Swei, Phd – San Francisco State University
Co-author: Grace Shaw – San Francisco State University