College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China.
Institute of Applied Ecology, Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, Nanjing, China.
Ecol Lett. 2023 Oct;26(10):1780-1791. doi: 10.1111/ele.14294. Epub 2023 Aug 16.
Species functional traits can influence pathogen transmission processes, and consequently affect species' host status, pathogen diversity, and community-level infection risk. We here investigated, for 143 European waterbird species, effects of functional traits on host status and pathogen diversity (subtype richness) for avian influenza virus at species level. We then explored the association between functional diversity and HPAI H5Nx occurrence at the community level for 2016/17 and 2021/22 epidemics in Europe. We found that both host status and subtype richness were shaped by several traits, such as diet guild and dispersal ability, and that the community-weighted means of these traits were also correlated with community-level risk of H5Nx occurrence. Moreover, functional divergence was negatively associated with H5Nx occurrence, indicating that functional diversity can reduce infection risk. Our findings highlight the value of integrating trait-based ecology into the framework of diversity-disease relationship, and provide new insights for HPAI prediction and prevention.
物种的功能特征可以影响病原体的传播过程，从而影响物种的宿主地位、病原体多样性和群落水平的感染风险。在这里，我们针对 143 种欧洲水鸟物种，研究了功能特征对流感病毒在物种水平上的宿主地位和病原体多样性（亚型丰富度）的影响。然后，我们探讨了在欧洲 2016/17 年和 2021/22 年流行期间，功能多样性与高致病性禽流感 H5Nx 发生的社区水平之间的关联。我们发现，宿主地位和亚型丰富度都受到多种特征的影响，例如饮食群体和扩散能力，并且这些特征的群落加权平均值也与社区水平上 H5Nx 发生的风险相关。此外，功能分歧与 H5Nx 的发生呈负相关，表明功能多样性可以降低感染风险。我们的研究结果强调了将基于特征的生态学纳入多样性-疾病关系框架的价值，并为高致病性禽流感的预测和预防提供了新的见解。
