The Environmental Context of Wildlife Disease

Abstract

The environmental context of an infectious disease refers to those infection determinants that are neither a feature of the causative agent nor a characteristic of the host population. They define what is also termed the “ecological niche” of the disease. Understanding the relationship between an infection and the surrounding environment in a quantitative fashion can be very useful, particularly because it can help predict disease occurrence and even elucidate parasite life cycle and mode of transmission. Because different processes determine disease occurrence at different spatial scales it is often important to conduct these investigations across multiple spatial and temporal scales. In this chapter we analyze various aspects of the environmental context of infection and discuss multiple case studies where this approach has been applied successfully to a broad range of parasitic organisms.