Forecasting parasite sharing under climate change

Ignacio Morales-Castilla, Paula Pappalardo, Maxwell J. Farrell, A. Alonso Aguirre, Shan Huang, Alyssa-lois M. Gehman, Tad Dallas, Dominique Gravel, T. Jonathan Davies

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.
Original languageEnglish
Article number20200360
Number of pages13
JournalPhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Volume376
Issue number1837
Early online date20 Sept 2021
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Nov 2021

Keywords

  • parasite sharing
  • climate change
  • host–parasiteinteractions
  • North American ungulates
  • nichemodelling

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