ArticlePloS one2014
The scaling of host density with richness affects the direction, shape, and detectability of diversity-disease relationships.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond Species Richness: The Importance of Phylogenetic Dimensions of Biodiversity in Disease Ecology.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Review
- Abiotic and biotic factors jointly influence the contact and environmental transmission of a generalist pathogen.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Diverging effects of host density and richness across biological scales drive diversity-disease outcomes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- It's about time: small mammal communities and Lyme disease emergence.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Malaria Risk Drivers in the Brazilian Amazon: Land Use-Land Cover Interactions and Biological Diversity.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Bird community effects on avian malaria infections.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Intraspecific trait variation and changing life-history strategies explain host community disease risk along a temperature gradient.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- An eco-epidemiological modeling approach to investigate dilution effect in two different tick-borne pathosystems.Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America · 2022Article
- Dilution of Epidemic Potential of Environmentally Transmitted Infectious Diseases for Species with Partially Overlapping Habitats.The American naturalist · 2022Article
- Dilution effects in disease ecology.Ecology letters · 2021Review
- The effect of host community functional traits on plant disease risk varies along an elevational gradient.eLife · 2021Article
- Host and parasite traits predict cross-species parasite acquisition by introduced mammals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Local Tree Diversity Suppresses Foliar Fungal Infestation and Decreases Morphological But Not Molecular Richness in a Young Subtropical Forest.Journal of fungi (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Biodiversity loss underlies the dilution effect of biodiversity.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- Towards a mechanistic understanding of competence: a missing link in diversity-disease research.Parasitology · 2020Article
- Disease hotspots or hot species? Infection dynamics in multi-host metacommunities controlled by species identity, not source location.Ecology letters · 2020Article
- A note on species richness and the variance of epidemic severity.Journal of mathematical biology · 2020Article
- Towards common ground in the biodiversity-disease debate.Nature ecology & evolution · 2020Review
- Phylogenetic aggregation increases zoonotic potential of mammalian viruses.Biology letters · 2019Article
- Measuring the shape of the biodiversity-disease relationship across systems reveals new findings and key gaps.Nature communications · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Pathogen transmission responds differently to host richness and abundance, two unique components of host diversity. However, the heated debate around whether biodiversity generally increases or decreases disease has not considered the relationships between host richness and abundance that may exist in natural systems. Here we use a multi-species model to study how the scaling of total host community abundance with species richness mediates diversity-disease relationships. For pathogens with density-dependent transmission, non-monotonic trends emerge between pathogen transmission and host richness when host community abundance saturates with richness. Further, host species identity drives high variability in pathogen transmission in depauperate communities, but this effect diminishes as host richness accumulates. Using simulation we show that high variability in low richness communities and the non-monotonic relationship observed with host community saturation may reduce the detectability of trends in empirical data. Our study emphasizes that understanding the patterns and predictability of host community composition and pathogen transmission mode will be crucial for predicting where and when specific diversity-disease relationships should occur in natural systems.
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