Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, University of Georgia, PO Drawer E, Aiken, SC 29801, USA.
J Genet. 2020;99(1). doi: 10.1007/s12041-020-01225-7.
Parasites, and the diseases they cause, are important from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they can negatively affect host fitness and can regulate host populations. Consequently, conservation biology has long recognized the vital role that parasites can play in the process of species endangerment and recovery. However, we are only beginning to understand how deeply parasites are embedded in ecological systems, and there is a growing recognition of the important ways in which parasites affect ecosystem structure and function. Thus, there is an urgent need to revisit how parasites are viewed from a conservation perspective and broaden the role that disease ecology plays in conservation-related research and outcomes. This review broadly focusses on the role that disease ecology can play in biological conservation. Our review specifically emphasizes on how the integration of tools and analytical approaches associated with both disease and molecular ecology can be leveraged to aid conservation biology. Our review first concentrates on disease mediated extinctions and wildlife epidemics. We then focus on elucidating how host-parasite interactions has improved our understanding of the eco-evolutionary dynamics affecting hosts at the individual, population, community and ecosystem scales. We believe that the role of parasites as drivers and indicators of ecosystem health is especially an exciting area of research that has the potential to fundamentally alter our view of parasites and their role in biological conservation. The review concludes with a broad overview of the current and potential applications of modern genomic tools in disease ecology to aid biological conservation.
寄生虫及其引起的疾病从生态和进化的角度来看非常重要，因为它们会对宿主的适应性产生负面影响，并能调节宿主的种群数量。因此，保护生物学早就认识到寄生虫在物种濒危和恢复过程中可以发挥至关重要的作用。然而，我们才刚刚开始了解寄生虫在生态系统中是如何根深蒂固的，越来越认识到寄生虫影响生态系统结构和功能的重要方式。因此，迫切需要重新审视从保护角度看待寄生虫的方式，并扩大疾病生态学在与保护相关的研究和成果中的作用。
本篇综述广泛关注疾病生态学在生物保护中的作用。我们的综述特别强调了如何利用与疾病和分子生态学相关的工具和分析方法来辅助保护生物学。我们的综述首先集中讨论了疾病介导的灭绝和野生动物流行病。然后，我们重点阐述了宿主-寄生虫相互作用如何提高我们对影响个体、种群、群落和生态系统尺度宿主的生态进化动态的理解。我们认为，寄生虫作为驱动因素和生态系统健康指标的作用是一个特别令人兴奋的研究领域，有可能从根本上改变我们对寄生虫及其在生物保护中的作用的看法。综述最后概述了现代基因组工具在疾病生态学中辅助生物保护的当前和潜在应用。
