Speakers
Description
Rapid Land-Use Change (LUC) across the Amazon is transforming biodiverse forests into fragmented agricultural landscapes, creating novel interfaces among wildlife, livestock, and people. Despite recognition of LUC as a major driver of pandemic risk, the interacting ecological, physiological, and social mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. The SIMPEL project (IZW-WCS, Volkswagen Foundation) applies an integrative One Health approach in Bolivia and Colombia to support evidence-based interventions that protect both biodiversity and human health.
Using a space-for-time design, we investigate four components across a disturbance gradient: (1) human-nature relations and spillover risks with local and indigenous communities; (2) wildlife host community dynamics in bats, rodents, their ectoparasites and vectors; (3) physiological and immune responses of wildlife hosts to habitat degradation; and (4) pathogen diversity and dynamics.
Early results confirm that LUC restructures wildlife communities and modulates pathogen dynamics in taxon- and site-specific ways. People living in areas bordering deforestation become vulnerable due to the degradation of their environment, their livelihoods, and their health. By integrating ecological, molecular, immunological, and social data, the project aims to generate actionable evidence to inform surveillance, land-use planning, and risk reduction in a biodiverse region where deforestation is outpacing our understanding of its consequences.
Keywords
Land-use change; Zoonotic pathogens; Wildlife communities; Pandemic prevention; Amazon; SIMPEL
| Registration ID | OHS26-100 |
|---|---|
| Professional Status of the Speaker | Postdoc |
| Junior Scientist Status | No, I am not a Junior Scientist. |
Author
Co-authors
External references
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