PARENT SESSION
Symposium 3: Emerging Diseases: Stressing the Union of Community Ecology and Epidemiology
Organized by: S Collinge and C Ray
Monday, August 4. 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM, SITCC Chatham Ballroom C.

Synthesis and conclusions: Community modules and infectious disease epidemiology.

Holt, Robert¹, ¹ University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA

ABSTRACT- This talk provides an overview of common themes that emerge from case studies presented by other speakers in the symposium. I will suggest that one approach to analyzing the interface of classical community ecology and epidemiology is the close analysis of community modules: small sets of species interacting in a specified pattern of interactions. Systems with infectious disease can both mimic familiar modules (e.g. food chains, shared predation leading to apparent competition, and intraguild predation) and lead to interesting effects when woven into modules that exist independent of the disease. Infectious disease impacts in a community context often involve an interesting blend of trait-mediated and density-mediated indirect interactions, with important and at times even surprising dynamical consequences. This will be illustrated using several models, including models with a mixture of predator-prey and host-pathogen interactions.

Key words: disease, theory, indirect interactions, modules