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3rd May: Impacts of land conversion on infectious diseases circulating in wild populations

May 3, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Christina Faust headshot

Impacts of land conversion on infectious diseases circulating in wild populations 

Christina Faust
School of Biodiversity, One Health & Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow

Wednesday 3rd May, 1-2pm, Cottrell 2V1 and streamed on Teams (contact the seminar organiser for the Teams link).
This seminar is open to all staff, students and affiliates of the University of Stirling. The seminar is hosted by Biological and Environmental Sciences (BES). 

Who this may appeal to: The talk will cover land use change and impacts on infectious diseases in wild animal populations and implications for zoonotic spillover. I will talk about some machine learning methods we have been using to investigate multi-scale processes impacting disease outcomes. In addition, I will be talking about some new work investigating viral communities in restoring landscapes. The talk will use methods from earth and planetary observation, but address questions in the ecosystem change and healthy environment groups.

Abstract: ​​​​​​​In some regions around the globe, landscapes are being converted from natural habitats into a mosaic of agriculture and other human-dominated landscapes. In other areas, human-dominated landscapes are being restored for various biodiversity or carbon capture targets. These shifts in land use impact plant and animal species – and concomitant to this change in biodiversity is a change in abundance and diversity of the pathogens that infect the animals and plants remaining. Transmission of a pathogen can decline or increase due to changes in availability of suitable hosts, changes in the abiotic environment, altered movement of hosts or some other impact of changing landscapes.  We currently lack the ability to accurately predict the response of a particular pathogen in a landscape undergoing conversion. In this talk, I will give an overview of theory and study systems we are using to disentangle factors affecting pathogens in changing landscapes.  I will discuss modular multi-scale models that we have been using to forecast Hendra virus shedding and spillover risk from flying foxes in Australia.  Then I will give an overview of small mammal field studies in Uganda and Scotland and the pathogens and parasites we are tracking across deforestation and restoration gradients.  The aim of this research is to identify underlying host, parasite, and environmental traits that are important for predicting short-term and long-term responses to land conversion.

Bio: Christina obtained a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University in 2016 and has conducted postdoctoral research on the environmental drivers of zoonotic disease at Oxford University, Montana State University and Penn State University. In her research, she has applied multidisciplinary approaches to address questions in disease ecology: using theoretical models to develop testable hypotheses, developing multiscale models for empirical field data and using satellite imagery and population genetics to understand transmission across larger scales. She is currently a NERC Independent Research Fellow working on ‘Identifying mechanisms driving spatiotemporal disease dynamics in converted landscapes.’

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Details

Date:
May 3, 2023
Time:
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Venue

Cottrell 2V1

Organizer

Tony Robertson
Email
tony.robertson@stir.ac.uk

Theme by the University of Stirling