Dataset Information

A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline.

ABSTRACT: Long-term data allow ecologists to assess trajectories of population abundance. Without this context, it is impossible to know whether a taxon is thriving or declining to extinction. For parasites of wildlife, there are few long-term data-a gap that creates an impediment to managing parasite biodiversity and infectious threats in a changing world. We produced a century-scale time series of metazoan parasite abundance and used it to test whether parasitism is changing in Puget Sound, United States, and, if so, why. We performed parasitological dissection of fluid-preserved specimens held in natural history collections for eight fish species collected between 1880 and 2019. We found that parasite taxa using three or more obligately required host species-a group that comprised 52% of the parasite taxa we detected-declined in abundance at a rate of 10.9% per decade, whereas no change in abundance was detected for parasites using one or two obligately required host species. We tested several potential mechanisms for the decline in 3+-host parasites and found that parasite abundance was negatively correlated with sea surface temperature, diminishing at a rate of 38% for every 1 °C increase. Although the temperature effect was strong, it did not explain all variability in parasite burden, suggesting that other factors may also have contributed to the long-term declines we observed. These data document one century of climate-associated parasite decline in Puget Sound-a massive loss of biodiversity, undetected until now.

SUBMITTER: Wood CL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9934024 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline.

Wood Chelsea L CL Welicky Rachel L RL Preisser Whitney C WC Leslie Katie L KL Mastick Natalie N Greene Correigh C Maslenikov Katherine P KP Tornabene Luke L Kinsella John M JM Essington Timothy E TE

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20230109 3

Long-term data allow ecologists to assess trajectories of population abundance. Without this context, it is impossible to know whether a taxon is thriving or declining to extinction. For parasites of wildlife, there are few long-term data-a gap that creates an impediment to managing parasite biodiversity and infectious threats in a changing world. We produced a century-scale time series of metazoan parasite abundance and used it to test whether parasitism is changing in Puget Sound, United State ...[more]

PMID: 36623180

Similar Datasets

Project description:Climate-induced tree mortality became a global phenomenon during the last century and it is expected to increase in many regions in the future along with a further increase in the frequency of drought and heat events. However, tree mortality at the ecosystem level remains challenging to quantify since long-term, tree-individual, reliable observations are scarce. Here, we present a unique data set of monitoring records from 276 permanent plots located in 95 forest stands across Switzerland, which include five major European tree species (Norway spruce, Scots pine, silver fir, European beech, and sessile and common oak) and cover a time span of over one century (1898-2013), with inventory periods of 5-10 years. The long-term average annual mortality rate of the investigated forest stands was 1.5%. In general, species-specific annual mortality rates did not consistently increase over the last decades, except for Scots pine forests at lower altitudes, which exhibited a clear increase of mortality since the 1960s. Temporal trends of tree mortality varied also depending on diameter at breast height (DBH), with large trees generally experiencing an increase in mortality, while mortality of small trees tended to decrease. Normalized mortality rates were remarkably similar between species and a modest, but a consistent and steady increasing trend was apparent throughout the study period. Mixed effects models revealed that gradually changing stand parameters (stand basal area and stand age) had the strongest impact on mortality rates, modulated by climate, which had increasing importance during the last decades. Hereby, recent climatic changes had highly variable effects on tree mortality rates, depending on the species in combination with abiotic and biotic stand and site conditions. This suggests that forest species composition and species ranges may change under future climate conditions. Our data set highlights the complexity of forest dynamical processes such as long-term, gradual changes of forest structure, demography and species composition, which together with climate determine mortality rates.

Dataset Information

A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline.

Publications

A reconstruction of parasite burden reveals one century of climate-associated parasite decline.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets