Studying the interface of movement, life-history, behavior, and disease
Expanding the interface of movement and diseaseFrom Manlove et al. (2022) Ecology Letters
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We are working with a national research team to better understand the interface between movement and disease ecology. Our group is exploring emerging tools from movement and behavioral ecology, and developing workflows that connect these tools to critical questions in disease dynamics. In early 2022, the team published a methods paper in Ecology Letters led by Dr. Mark Wilber; and our synthesis paper at Ecology Letters came out early in the summer of 2022. On the application front, our lab is part of a national team that is applying these ideas in a nation-wide study of SARS-CoV-2 in free ranging deer.
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We are working with an international team to develop understanding at the spatial-social interface. A manuscript drafting our major ideas is currently under review and a preprint is available here. In application, our group is collaborating with the Wild Sheep Working Group's Risk of Contact Tool team to compare standard bighorn sheep habitat models and understand how transferable those models are to novel environments. We are also engaged in a forthcoming issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on the spatial-social interface.
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Using social-environmental interactions to build transferable models of animal movementFrom Webber et al. (2023) Biological Reviews)
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Bighorn disease ecology and herd responsesWe are working with the Nevada Department of Wildlife in pursuit of two objectives: first, to understand the processes that contribute to variation in demographic responses following die-off events in bighorn sheep; and second, to delineate drivers of high-risk "foray" movements throughout Nevada. MS Student Kylie Sinclair's thesis explored demographic drivers of bighorn herds throughout Nevada, and PhD Student Lauren Ricci studies drivers of bighorn movement and connectivity, and how those drivers could shape long-term, wide-scale patterns of pathogen transmission throughout the state.
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From Sinclair, K.S. (2020)
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Host- and pathogen-drivers of variation in disease severityFrom Johnson et al. (2022). Animals.
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We are collaborating with Zion National Park, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Nevada Department of Wildlife, and UC Davis on a set of projects and analyses of animal health data that are intended to clarify what part of the variation in bighorn sheep pneumonia severity is attributable to differences in pathogen strain, host phenotype, or in-host mechanistic processes. Brianna Johnson's paper at Animals on a low-virulence M. ovipneumoniae spillover event at ZNP is available here. Our analysis of a disease event at Hardware Ranch and Rio Grande Gorge is under revision at Ecology and Evolution, and a pre-print is available here. Our piece with Liz Bowen on gene transcription vis a vis disease events was recently published at Conservation Physiology.
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We collaborated with the US Geological Survey to study behavioral and environmental drivers of bighorn movements in the eastern Mojave desert. MS Student Grete Wilson-Henjum's research explored environmental drivers of space-use in Mojave bighorn populations, with an eye toward mitigating disease spillover risks.
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Drivers of bighorn movement dynamics and pathogen spillover risk in the eastern Mojave |
Social group formation and stability in an intensively studied Rocky Mountain bighorn herd |
We are collaborating with Dr. Jack Hogg and Drs. Paul Cross and Alynn Martin at the USGS on a project the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' Bison Range to study social drivers of group membership, formation, and cohesion. Alynn and Jack recently led a paper on disease effects on horn growth, and Tom Besser led a paper on the pneumonia die-off in the Bison Range herd in 2016. MS student Toni Proeschold's thesis dug into social factors driving group structure in the Bison Range bighorn herd.
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