A Combination of Species Evenness and Functional Diversity Is the Best Predictor of Disease Risk in Multihost Communities

• DOI: 10.1086/683774
• Publication Date: 2015-10-13T15:12:05Z
• Authors: Lifan Chen; Shurong Zhou
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 03 medical and health sciences; Population Dynamics; Animals; Biodiversity; 14. Life underwater; 15. Life on land; Communicable Diseases; Models, Biological; Disease Outbreaks

Although accumulated evidence has shown that biodiversity can play an important role in disease transmission and prevalence, it remains unclear how different measures of diversity based on taxonomy or function perform predicting risk. In this article, we assess the relative ability species richness, Shannon's evenness index, single functional traits, several metrics their interactions to predict risk both nonequilibrium equilibrium communities simulated by a multihost epidemiological model. On basis generalized linear models Akaike's information criterion, found index outperforms richness as variable explaining variation risk, while best combination consists diversity. This study is, our knowledge, first demonstrate played accounting for communities.