Impacts of emerging infectious disease on wildlife populations

Abstract

Abstract Parasites and pathogens can regulate host populations by affecting birth rates, death rates, and other demographic processes. Therefore, infectious disease dynamics are important for conservation biology, whether host species were endangered before a new pathogen emerged or whether the host species used to be common and is now plagued by a pathogen with persistent reservoirs. However, without long-term surveillance data, these impacts may go undocumented until a pathogen is well established in the host population, complicating control efforts. This chapter describes several emerging infectious diseases and their impacts on wildlife.