Environmental mercury (Hg) contamination of the global tropics outpaces our understanding of its consequences for biodiversity. Knowledge gaps of pollution exposure could obscure conservation threats in the Neotropics: a region that supports over half of the world’s species, but faces ongoing land-use change and Hg emission via artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). Due to their global distribution and sensitivity to po...

Network approaches have revolutionized the study of ecological interactions. Social, movement and ecological networks have all been integral to studying infectious disease ecology. However, conventional (dyadic) network approaches are limited in their ability to capture higher‐order interactions. We present simplicial sets as a tool that addresses this limitation. First, we explain what simplicial sets are. Second, we explain...

Host species that can independently maintain a pathogen in a host community and contribute to infection in other species are important targets for disease management. However, the potential of host species to maintain a pathogen is not fixed over time, and an important challenge is understanding how within‐ and across‐season variability in host maintenance potential affects pathogen persistence over longer time scales relevant...

Pathogen transmission depends on host density, mobility and contact. These components emerge from host and pathogen movements that themselves arise through interactions with the surrounding environment. The environment, the emergent host and pathogen movements, and the subsequent patterns of density, mobility and contact form an ‘epidemiological landscape’ connecting the environment to specific locations where transmissions oc...

The ongoing explosion of fine‐resolution movement data in animal systems provides a unique opportunity to empirically quantify spatial, temporal and individual variation in transmission risk and improve our ability to forecast disease outbreaks. However, we lack a generalizable model that can leverage movement data to quantify transmission risk and how it affects pathogen invasion and persistence on heterogeneous landscapes. W...

When facing an emerging infectious disease of conservation concern, we often have little information on the nature of the host‐parasite interaction to inform management decisions. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the life‐history strategies of host species can be predictive of individual‐ and population‐level responses to infectious disease, even without detailed knowledge on the specifics of the host‐parasite i...

Pathogen persistence in host communities is influenced by processes operating at the individual host to landscape‐level scale, but isolating the relative contributions of these processes is challenging. We developed theory to partition the influence of host species, habitat patches and landscape connectivity on pathogen persistence within metacommunities of hosts and pathogens. We used this framework to quantify the contributi...

Symbiotic microbial communities are important for host health, but the processes shaping these communities are poorly understood. Understanding how community assembly processes jointly affect microbial community composition is limited because inflexible community models rely on rejecting dispersal and drift before considering selection. We developed a flexible community assembly model based on neutral theory to ask: How do dis...

Accurate estimates of seasonal infection risk can be used by animal health officials to predict future disease risk and improve understanding of the mechanisms driving disease dynamics. It can be difficult to estimate seasonal infection risk in wildlife disease systems because surveillance assays typically target antibodies (serosurveillance), which are not necessarily indicative of current infection, and serosurveillance samp...

While disease‐induced extinction is generally considered rare, a number of recently emerging infectious diseases with load‐dependent pathology have led to extinction in wildlife populations. Transmission is a critical factor affecting disease‐induced extinction, but the relative importance of transmission compared to load‐dependent host resistance and tolerance is currently unknown. Using a combination of models and experiment...

Few hosts have many parasites while many hosts have few parasites. This axiom of macroparasite aggregation is so pervasive it is considered a general law in disease ecology, with important implications for the dynamics of host–parasite systems. Because of these dynamical implications, a significant amount of work has explored both the various mechanisms leading to parasite aggregation patterns and how to infer mechanism from t...

Aim The recently proposed maximum entropy theory of ecology predicts that all nested species–area relationships ( SARs ) will collapse to a single, universal curve that exhibits a decreasing log–log slope with increasing scale, suggesting that the power law form of the SAR is invalid at any scale. In this analysis we test the generality of this scale collapse behaviour and determine the scale at which approximate power law beh...

Many fundamental properties of ecological systems and interactions are tied to body size and a related metric, the metabolic rate distribution, both within and across species. A previously proposed maximum entropy theory of ecology (METE) predicts numerous interrelated macroecological patterns, including spatial distributions of individuals within species, abundance distributions across species, species area relationships, and...