Why infectious disease research needs community ecology

Abstract

Bringing ecology to infection The tools we use to investigate infectious diseases tend to focus on specific one-host–one-pathogen relationships, but pathogens often have complex life cycles involving many hosts. Johnson et al. review how such complexity is analyzed by community ecologists. Ecologists have the investigative tools to probe cause and effect relationships that change with spatial scale in multispecies communities. These techniques are used to monitor the ways in which communities change through time and to probe the heterogeneity that characterizes individuals, species, and assemblages—all issues that are also essential for disease specialists to understand. Science , this issue 10.1126/science.1259504