Spatiotemporal variation in drivers of parasitism in a wild wood mouse population

Host-parasite interactions in nature are driven by a range of factors across several ecological scales, so observed relationships are often context-dependent. Importantly, if these factors vary across space and time, practical sampling limitations can limit or bias inferences, and the relative importance of different drivers can be hard to discern.

Here we ask to what degree environmental, host, and within-host influences on parasitism are shaped by spatiotemporal variation. We use a replicated, longitudinal dataset of nearly 1000 individual wood mice (Apodemus sylvaticus) encompassing 6 years of sampling across 5 different woodland sites and investigate drivers of infection intensity with a highly prevalent gastrointestinal nematode, Heligmosomoides polygyrus.

We used a Bayesian modelling approach to further quantify if and how each factor varied in space and time. Finally, we examined the extent to which a lack of spatially or temporally replication (i.e., within single years or...