Towards a more healthy conservation paradigm: integrating disease and molecular ecology to aid biological conservation†

Abstract

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.

Figure 1

Schematic illustrating host, parasite and environmental factors influencing disease dynamics across scales of biological organization, at the individual, population, community and ecosystem scales. It is noteworthy that the effect of host and parasite factors on disease dynamics at each level is often not mutually exclusive and can range from individual to population and community/ecosystem levels.

Figure 2

Applications of various high-throughput genomic tools (inner circle) to answer key questions in disease ecology (outer circle). Each genomic tool is represented by a different colour and colour gradients in the outer circle represent the multiple genomic approaches that can be used to answer a given question in the box. For instance, parasite origin and spread can be inferred using landscape genomics and/or phylogenomics.