Biodiversity, globalization and shifting disease ecologies

Urban areas intrude on once-wild places. On the edge of the Everglades, in Florida.

As I was researching a story for the Observer, I had to go poking through the December 2009 issue of BioScience, and I stumbled across an interesting article reviewing biodiversity declines and global disease ecology. The authors assert that multiple factors working synergistically are leaving humans more at risk of contracting infectious diseases — some new and some classical but re-emerging. This is the gist of their paper:

“We propose that habitat destruction and biodiversity loss associated with biotic homogenization can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans.” {1}

This idea is a chronic, low-grade theme in media stories in recent time: Swine flu, ebola virus, nipah virus, West Nile virus, the re-emergence of cholera, and the forces of climate change altering the disease dynamics of insect-borne diseases like malaria, to name a few.

The authors write that the coupling of both globalization — and its ability to shuttle rapidly people and organisms across the globe — and ecological disruption (in the form of degraded or altered habitat) are linked to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. While many people have hashed out whether we are or are not in middle of a sixth mass extinction event (most Big Thinkers believe we are),

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Sudden Oak Death and P. ramorum

California bay laurel leaves infected with Phytophthora ramorum. Bay leaves typically become infected with P ramorum, the causal agent of SOD, on the tips of their leaves where water and dew collect. Bay leaves play a significant role in the spread of the disease to oak trees. (Photo courtesy D. Schmidt, Garbelotto Forest Pathology Lab, UC Berkeley)

Sudden Oak Death affects western coastal forests in the U.S. It’s an emerging pathogen caused by a fungus-like brown-algae organism that kills oak trees. Before 2001, this pathogen was not known to science. It was named Phytophthora ramorum.

I recently wrote a story that ran in the Charlotte Observer (also ran in the Raleigh News & Observer) about a researcher studying this disease using a combination of landscape epidemiology, high-tech mapping and GIS. But because of space constraints, a lot of the cool ecology and modeling aspects had to get cut or just weren’t included in the print/online story. So this post is about the stuff that did not make it in.

The main source for the story was the director of the Center for Applied Geographic Information Systems at UNC-Charlotte, Ross Meentemeyer. His background is in landscape ecology and GIS. You could say his center makes detailed maps by melding high-powered computational technologies and remote sensing tools like aerial imagery with good old-fashioned muddy-boots-ecology field work.

Meentemeyer is a self-described family man and outdoors man, and he spends several weeks each year out West doing field work and studying Sudden Oak Death and it’s causative agent, P. ramorum.

“As a landscape ecologist, a lot of my work has focused on developing models of species distributions that predict where and why different plant species and other organisms exist where they do,” Meentemeyer said. “And I use a lot of geographical systems technologies for mapping and developing different geographical models.”

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