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Spatial configuration becomes more important with increasing habitat loss: a simulation study of environmentally-transmitted parasites

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Abstract

Context

Landscape changes can be an important modifier of disease. Habitat fragmentation commonly results in reduced connectivity in host populations and increased use of the remaining habitat. For environmentally transmitted parasites, this presents a possible trade-off between transmission potential at the local and global level.

Objectives

We quantify the effects of fragmentation on the transmission of an environmentally transmitted parasite, teasing apart the relative effects of habitat composition and configuration on both host movement behaviour and subsequent infection patterns.

Methods

We use a spatially-explicit epidemiological model to simulate the effects of habitat fragmentation, using, as an example, whipworm (Trichuris sp.) within a red colobus monkey population (Procolobus rufomitratus).

Results

We found that habitat fragmentation did not always lead to a trade-off between population connectivity and concentration of habitat use in host movement behaviour or in final population infection patterns. However, our simulation results suggest the spatial configuration of the remaining habitat became increasingly influential on behavioural and infection outcomes as habitat was removed. Additionally, we found common fragmentation metrics provided little ability to explain variation in propagation of infections.

Conclusions

Our results suggest an interaction between habitat configuration and composition should be considered when assessing disease related impacts of habitat fragmentation on environmentally transmitted parasites, especially in cases where habitat loss is high (≥ 30%). We also propose that spatially-explicit simulations that capture a host’s response to fragmentation could aid in the development of novel landscape metrics targeted towards specific host-parasite-landscape systems.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology and the Uganda Wildlife Authority for permission to conduct this research, as well as two anonymous reviewers who gave helpful comments on this manuscript. Funding for the research was provided by the Canada Research Chairs Program, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Kyoto University, Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies, National Geographic and by NIH grant TW009237 as part of the joint NIH-NSF Ecology of Infectious Disease program and the UK Economic and Social Research Council. TRB was supported by an FQRNT Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, T1K 3M4, Canada

    Tyler R. Bonnell

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Emory University, 400 Dowman Drive, Atlanta, GA, 30322, USA

    Ria R. Ghai

  3. Department of Pathobiological Sciences and School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, USA

    Tony L. Goldberg

  4. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Raja Sengupta

  5. Department of Anthropology and McGill School of Environment, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

    Colin A. Chapman

  6. Wildlife Conservation Society, Bronx, NY, USA

    Colin A. Chapman

  7. Section of Social Systems Evolution, Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

    Colin A. Chapman

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  1. Tyler R. Bonnell
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  2. Ria R. Ghai
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  4. Raja Sengupta
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  5. Colin A. Chapman
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Correspondence to Tyler R. Bonnell.

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Bonnell, T.R., Ghai, R.R., Goldberg, T.L. et al. Spatial configuration becomes more important with increasing habitat loss: a simulation study of environmentally-transmitted parasites. Landscape Ecol 33, 1259–1272 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-018-0666-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-018-0666-4

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