ArticleNature communications2024
Diverging effects of host density and richness across biological scales drive diversity-disease outcomes.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Climate and mammal host community characteristics drive tuberculosis maintenance at the wildlife livestock interface.One health (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2026Article
- Integrating the Microbiome Into Infection Ecology and Evolution in Wild Animals.Molecular ecology · 2026Review
- Multiple Key Hosts and Network Structure Shape Viral Prevalence Across Multispecies Communities of Bees.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Filter feeding by oysters reduces disease transmission in a marine host-parasite system.Ecology · 2026Article
- Advancing Theory Underlying Diversity-Disease Relationships: Competence in the Context of Life History, Demography, and Disease.Integrative and comparative biology · 2025Article
- Crowding reduces per-capita parasite infection risk in a butterfly host.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Warming During Different Life Stages has Distinct Impacts on Host Resistance Ecology and Evolution.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Scaling up to understand disease risk: distinct roles of host functional traits in shaping infection risk of avian malaria across different scales.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding how biodiversity affects pathogen transmission remains an unresolved question due to the challenges in testing potential mechanisms in natural systems and how these mechanisms vary across biological scales. By quantifying transmission of an entire guild of parasites (larval trematodes) within 902 amphibian host communities, we show that the community-level drivers of infection depend critically on biological scale. At the individual host scale, increases in host richness led to fewer parasites per host for all parasite taxa, with no effect of host or predator densities. At the host community scale, however, the inhibitory effects of richness were counteracted by associated increases in total host density, leading to no overall change in parasite densities. Mechanistically, we find that while average host competence declined with increasing host richness, total community competence remained stable due to additive assembly patterns. These results help reconcile disease-diversity debates by empirically disentangling the roles of alternative ecological drivers of parasite transmission and how such effects depend on biological scale.
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Registered trials
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