ArticleBiology letters2022
Mammal virus diversity estimates are unstable due to accelerating discovery effort.
Article in Biology letters, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diversity and transmission and zoonotic potential of microbes in true insectivores.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Zoos as Sentinels? A Meta-Analysis of Seroprevalence of Terrestrial Mammalian Viruses in Zoos.EcoHealth · 2023Pooled it
- Predicting unknown mammalian viral hosts with Dynamic Positive-Unlabeled learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Virome Diversity in Three Bat Species in Different Environments in Southern Spain.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Host-virus association databases as tools for understanding viral spillover at varying scales.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2026Article
- Interepidemic Rift Valley fever in East Africa: the recent risk landscape and projected impacts of global change.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Climate sensitivity is widely but unevenly spread across zoonotic diseases.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Viral epidemic potential is not uniformly distributed across the bat phylogeny.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Diverse hosts, diverse immune systems: Evolutionary variation in bat immunology.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Pathogens and planetary change.Nature reviews. Biodiversity · 2025Article
- Towards a 'people and nature' paradigm for biodiversity and infectious disease.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Protocol to produce a systematic Arenavirus and Hantavirus host-pathogen database: Project ArHa.Wellcome open research · 2025Article
- Features that matter: Evolutionary signatures can predict viral transmission routes.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Identifying life-history patterns along the fast-slow continuum of mammalian viral carriers.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Temporal Dynamics, Discovery, and Emergence of Human-Transmissible RNA Viruses.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Using phylogeographic link-prediction in primates to prioritize human parasite screening.American journal of biological anthropology · 2023Article
- Robust evidence for bats as reservoir hosts is lacking in most African virus studies: a review and call to optimize sampling and conserve bats.Biology letters · 2023Review
- Network embedding unveils the hidden interactions in the mammalian virome.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Rodent trapping studies as an overlooked information source for understanding endemic and novel zoonotic spillover.PLoS neglected tropical diseases · 2023Article
- Population fluctuations and synanthropy explain transmission risk in rodent-borne zoonoses.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 7 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Host-virus association data underpin research into the distribution and eco-evolutionary correlates of viral diversity and zoonotic risk across host species. However, current knowledge of the wildlife virome is inherently constrained by historical discovery effort, and there are concerns that the reliability of ecological inference from host-virus data may be undermined by taxonomic and geographical sampling biases. Here, we evaluate whether current estimates of host-level viral diversity in wild mammals are stable enough to be considered biologically meaningful, by analysing a comprehensive dataset of discovery dates of 6571 unique mammal host-virus associations between 1930 and 2018. We show that virus discovery rates in mammal hosts are either constant or accelerating, with little evidence of declines towards viral richness asymptotes, even in highly sampled hosts. Consequently, inference of relative viral richness across host species has been unstable over time, particularly in bats, where intensified surveillance since the early 2000s caused a rapid rearrangement of species' ranked viral richness. Our results illustrate that comparative inference of host-level virus diversity across mammals is highly sensitive to even short-term changes in sampling effort. We advise caution to avoid overinterpreting patterns in current data, since it is feasible that an analysis conducted today could draw quite different conclusions than one conducted only a decade ago.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.