Disease dynamics during ecosystem restoration and faunal reassembly

Delayed establishment of slow life-history species during ecosystem restoration increases pathogen prevalence and persistence, especially when pathogen transmissibility (R_0) is high, in a stochastic multi-host metacommunity model.

• Why it matters: Biodiversity recovery is promoted to regulate infectious diseases, but it is unclear how transmission potential and the timing and life history of recovering hosts jointly shape disease dynamics during restoration.
• What they did: The authors built a stochastic multi-host metacommunity epidemic model and used generalized additive models and sensitivity analyses to test how R_0, establishment timing of slow life-history hosts, host succession, and spillover affect epidemic intensity, persistence, and spread speed.
• The result: R_0 was the dominant predictor of epidemic intensity, while delayed slow-host establishment prolonged fast-host dominance and increased persistence; the interaction between delayed timing and R_0 explained more than 90% of variation in pathogen persistence, and timing became the strongest persistence predictor once transmissibility was controlled.

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