Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel.
Ecol Lett. 2018 Apr;21(4):588-604. doi: 10.1111/ele.12917. Epub 2018 Feb 14.
Though epidemiology dates back to the 1700s, most mathematical representations of epidemics still use transmission rates averaged at the population scale, especially for wildlife diseases. In simplifying the contact process, we ignore the heterogeneities in host movements that complicate the real world, and overlook their impact on spatiotemporal patterns of disease burden. Movement ecology offers a set of tools that help unpack the transmission process, letting researchers more accurately model how animals within a population interact and spread pathogens. Analytical techniques from this growing field can also help expose the reverse process: how infection impacts movement behaviours, and therefore other ecological processes like feeding, reproduction, and dispersal. Here, we synthesise the contributions of movement ecology in disease research, with a particular focus on studies that have successfully used movement-based methods to quantify individual heterogeneity in exposure and transmission risk. Throughout, we highlight the rapid growth of both disease and movement ecology and comment on promising but unexplored avenues for research at their overlap. Ultimately, we suggest, including movement empowers ecologists to pose new questions, expanding our understanding of host-pathogen dynamics and improving our predictive capacity for wildlife and even human diseases.
尽管流行病学可以追溯到 18 世纪，但大多数对传染病的数学描述仍然使用在人群尺度上平均的传播率，尤其是针对野生动物疾病。在简化接触过程时，我们忽略了宿主运动中的异质性，这些异质性使现实世界变得复杂，并忽视了它们对疾病负担的时空模式的影响。运动生态学提供了一组工具，可以帮助解析传播过程，使研究人员能够更准确地模拟种群内动物如何相互作用和传播病原体。这个不断发展的领域的分析技术也有助于揭示相反的过程：感染如何影响运动行为，以及其他生态过程，如进食、繁殖和扩散。在这里，我们综合了运动生态学在疾病研究中的贡献，特别关注那些成功使用基于运动的方法来量化暴露和传播风险的个体异质性的研究。在整个过程中，我们强调了疾病和运动生态学的快速发展，并评论了它们重叠领域中具有前景但尚未探索的研究途径。最终，我们建议，将运动纳入生态学可以提出新的问题，扩展我们对宿主-病原体动态的理解，并提高我们对野生动物甚至人类疾病的预测能力。
