A5037480248- Viral Infections and Vectors
- Bat Biology and Ecology Studies
- Zoonotic diseases and public health
- Rabies epidemiology and control
- Gut microbiota and health
- Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research
University of Connecticut
2019-2024
University of Idaho
2019-2021
Forecasting the risk of pathogen spillover from reservoir populations wild or domestic animals is essential for effective deployment interventions such as wildlife vaccination culling. Due to sporadic nature events and limited availability data, developing validating robust, spatially explicit, predictions challenging. Recent efforts have begun make progress in this direction by capitalizing on machine learning methodologies. An important weakness existing approaches, however, that they...
Abstract Despite global investment in One Health disease surveillance, it remains difficult—and often very costly—to identify and monitor the wildlife reservoirs of novel zoonotic viruses. Statistical models can be used to guide sampling prioritization, but predictions from any given model may highly uncertain; moreover, systematic validation is rare, drivers performance are consequently under-documented. Here, we use bat hosts betacoronaviruses as a case study for data-driven process...
Abstract Public health concerns about recent viral epidemics have motivated researchers to seek novel ways understand pathogen infection in native, wildlife hosts. With its deep history of tools and perspectives for understanding the abundance distribution organisms, ecology can shed new light on dynamics. However, datasets allowing explorations communities from an ecological perspective are lacking. We sampled 1086 bats two, adjacent Puerto Rican caves tested them by herpesviruses,...
Abstract Public health concerns about recent viral epidemics have motivated researchers to seek transdisciplinary understanding of infection in wildlife hosts. With its deep history devoted explaining the abundance and distribution organisms, ecology can augment current methods for studying dynamics. However, datasets allowing ecological explorations communities are lacking, common delineating operational taxonomic units (OTUs), or “species”, subjective. Here, we comprehensively sampled...
Abstract Understanding how multi-scale host heterogeneity affects viral community assembly can illuminate ecological drivers of infection and host-switching. Yet, such studies are hindered by imperfect detection. To address this issue, we used a occupancy model – refashioned for the hierarchical nature molecular-detection methods to account failed detection when examining individual-level traits affect herpesvirus richness in eight species wild bats. We then predictions examine role sex...
Public health concerns about recent viral epidemics have motivated researchers to seek novel ways understand pathogen infection in native, wildlife hosts. With its deep history of tools and perspectives for understanding the abundance distribution organisms, ecology can shed new light on dynamics. However, datasets allowing explorations communities from an ecological perspective are lacking. We sampled 1,086 bats two, adjacent Puerto Rican caves tested them by herpesviruses, resulting 3,131...
Abstract Microbiomes perform vital functions for their mammalian hosts, making them potential drivers of host evolution. Understanding effects environmental factors and characteristics on the composition biodiversity microbiomes may provide novel insights into origin maintenance these symbiotic relationships. Our goals were to (1) characterize oral rectal bats in Puerto Rico; (2) determine geographic location that biodiversity. We collected from 3 sites, used 4 metrics (species richness,...