Declines in large wildlife increase landscape-level prevalence of rodent-borne disease in Africa.

ABSTRACT: Populations of large wildlife are declining on local and global scales. The impacts of this pulse of size-selective defaunation include cascading changes to smaller animals, particularly rodents, and alteration of many ecosystem processes and services, potentially involving changes to prevalence and transmission of zoonotic disease. Understanding linkages between biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease is important for both public health and nature conservation programs, and has been a source of much recent scientific debate. In the case of rodent-borne zoonoses, there is strong conceptual support, but limited empirical evidence, for the hypothesis that defaunation, the loss of large wildlife, increases zoonotic disease risk by directly or indirectly releasing controls on rodent density. We

SUBMITTER: Young HS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4024866 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature