Wildlife diseases: from individuals to ecosystems - Tompkins - 2010 - Journal of Animal Ecology - Wiley Online Library: "We review our ecological understanding of wildlife infectious diseases from the individual host to the ecosystem scale, highlighting where conceptual thinking lacks verification, discussing difficulties and challenges, and offering potential future research directions.
2. New molecular approaches hold potential to increase our understanding of parasite interactions within hosts. Also, advances in our knowledge of immune systems makes immunological parameters viable measures of parasite exposure, and useful tools for improving our understanding of causal mechanisms.
3. Studies of transmission dynamics have revealed the importance of heterogeneity in host behaviour and physiology, and of contact processes operating at different spatial and temporal scales. An important future challenge is to determine the key transmission mechanisms maintaining the persistence of different types of diseases in the wild.
4. Regulation of host populations is too complex to consider parasite effects in isolation from other factors. One solution is to seek a unified understanding of the conditions under which (and the ecological rules determining when) population scale impacts of parasites can occur."
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