How land use and climate variability impact on hosts and their parasite communities
Parasites – in the broadest sense encompassing everything from viruses to parasitoids – are major components of ecosystems. Beyond this, parasites shape community composition and, through effects on hosts, regulate biotic interactions and affect trophic cascades. Despite this importance, parasite biodiversity is largely overlooked and (Kuris et al., 2008) the drivers and consequences of parasite biodiversity are poorly understood (Halliday et al., 2019). The long-term arthropod sampling central to the Exploratories presents a powerful opportunity to fill these knowledge gaps. We will explore how land use intensity (LUI) interacts with climate variability to affect host community composition, abundance and health, and how this in turn is reflected in the biodiversity and composition of their parasite community.
In BuggedBugs we will:
- identify the full complement of parasites and pathogens of true bugs, and test how this community is affected by LUI, as well as host and plant community composition
- test how climate variability and LUI interact to shape host communities
- study short-term plasticity and adaption in key fitness traits as well as the long-term adaptive potential to global change in the true bugs
- synthesize these data to develop a robust and complete understanding about how LUI, climate variability and disturbance directly and indirectly affect the parasite community, nested within their true bug hosts and the wider environment
- Increasing LUI reduces plant diversity and abundance, which in turn reduces the abundance and diversity of the true bugs.
- Parasite diversity declines in concert with host richness and abundance.
- Pathogen abundance may decline or thrive in this disturbed parasite community.
- Climate change and host adaptation may affect these clear predictions in complex ways.
Scientific assistants
