Dr. Gui Becker awarded NSF grant to study impacts of rainfall variability on wildlife disease transmission

Dr. Gui Becker has been awarded an NSF grant as lead PI to study the impacts of rainfall variability on wildlife disease transmission. The project titled” Linking Host Life History, Movement Ecology, and Climate to Predict Epizootics in Megadiverse Tropical Amphibian Communities” is global in scope, with field sites in three megadiverse tropical regions: Brazil, Peru, and Cameroon. By advancing disease transmission theory for diverse species assemblages, this research will provide novel insights into community-level impacts of emerging diseases and will ultimately increase our capacity to forecast and respond to disease outbreaks. The project will integrate long-term field surveys and large-scale field experiments to test hypotheses on host movement patterns and infection dynamics under different rainfall scenarios. Field surveys and experimental data will be integrated within a multi-host disease modeling framework. This framework will apply recently developed N-mixture models accounting for imperfect host and pathogen detection, together with a Bayesian population viability analysis, to predict long-term host population stability exposed to pathogens under future climate scenarios. The researchers will work with the multimedia magazine bioGraphic to produce a video story detailing the motivation and progress of the team’s research in the field, with an expected reach of > 1 million views. The researchers will also work with the education department at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS) to develop and disseminate an introductory video, lesson plan, and interactive game for K-12 audiences that teach the concepts of community-level host-pathogen dynamics and the tools scientists use to study and model these systems. The projected reach is 35,000 K-12 teachers per year. Co-PIs on this project: Dr. Rayna Bell, California Academy of Sciences; Alessandro Catenazzi, Florida International University.

Gui radio-tracking wildlife in Brazil.
Gui radio-tracking wildlife in Brazil.
Rainforests in Brazil are suffering with frequent droughts. Photo: Gui Becker
Rainforests in Brazil are suffering with frequent droughts. Photo: Gui Becker