IMAGINE Collaborative Research: Linking individual variation in immunity and behavior to landscape patterns in disease risk using the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

Understanding the factors that reduce infections in animals is an essential step towards reducing human disease risk because an estimated 60% of pathogens that infect humans can also infect animals (including the virus that causes COVID-19). However, it is difficult to predict infectious disease risk in animal populations because it is not understood how changes in the quality of an animal’s environment (e.g., temperature, abundance of food) may change disease rates.

This project will investigate how variation in habitat quality affects the ecological dynamics of Lyme disease, the most common vector-borne disease in the US, affecting the health and well-being of over 300,000 people annually. Through a collaboration with the National Ecological Observatory Network, the research team will measure the effects of habitat quality on the behavioral and immune system traits of mice at 8 sites across the northeastern U.S. and develop statistical models to link these animal data to Lyme disease risk.

This project will benefit society by improving our ability to identify the times and places where risk of Lyme disease exposure can be minimized, directly benefitting hundreds of thousands of people each year. Through outreach, the project will educate the public about the factors that affect infectious disease and provide significant opportunities for training of high-school students, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs underrepresented in STEM fields.

Many behavioral and immune system traits are sensitive to the environment. But the extent to which this variation drives infectious disease risk in nature remains obscure. For example, although it is known that particular rodent species are critical hosts of B. burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme disease, it is unknown how the environment affects traits that influence disease risk.

This research project will leverage the continental scale of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to quantify behavioral and immunological traits of two keystone rodent hosts for B. burgdorferi, a pathogen that affects over 300,000 people in the U.S. each year. This project tests the hypothesis that variation in the environment couples and decouples individual host traits, altering the abundance of competent hosts and driving the emergence of disease hot and cold spots.

This project will quantify B. burgdorferi competence in two rodent species across 8 NEON sites over 3-years, and use statistical modeling to link individual variation in infection susceptibility to variation in the abiotic and biotic environment and hence variation in Lyme disease risk. The utility of this approach will be evaluated by using these models to forecast disease prevalence as a function of current climatic and habitat conditions at additional NEON sites in future years.

Ultimately, the project will identify how organism-environment interactions drive the susceptibility of individual hosts to infection, and will also identify the level(s) of biological organization (e.g., individuals, populations, species) at which small changes have large consequences for increased disease risk.

This award was co-funded by the Symbiosis, Infection and Immunity Program in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems and the Macrosystems Biology and NEON Enabled Science Program in the Division of Environmental Biology.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.