Abstract
Human population levels are continuously on the rise, and this is accompanied by unprecedented rates of urbanisation. The resulting levels of environmental change both directly and indirectly affect various ecosystem processes and cause steep biodiversity loss, making it a major concern in conservation biology. Yet given the inexorable rate of urbanisation we urgently have to discern cities as environments, which provide unique sets of opportunities and challenges for wildlife. Yet, animals that survive and thrive in cities have to deal with the spatio-temporal variability, novelty and complexity of urban landscapes, as well as with the altered pace of social life, as urban environments often sustain larger populations of the species dwelling in cities than more natural habitats. This likely poses specific social challenges, but also sets the conditions for the spread of socially transmitted diseases. Yet little is known about how disease transmission is actually affected by the heterogeneity of the urban landscape and how that is driven by individual variation in the capacities that animals require to live in urban environments.
This project will, therefore, investigate which factors drive disease dynamics at the population-level in wild animals thriving in urban environments. Given that the transmission of the disease contains a significant individual component, this will be combined with detailed measures of among individual variation in social behaviour
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)