Data from: Cross-scale dynamics in community and disease ecology: relative timescales shape the community ecology of pathogens

Communities of free-living organisms are shaped by processes operating
within and among patches of habitat, while pathogen communities are shaped
by analogous processes operating within and among hosts. Resource
competition (R) theory can describe dynamics within patches or hosts,
while metacommunity dynamics describe competition-colonization tradeoffs,
extinction debts, and superinfection. However, models at this broader
scale often assume instantaneous competitive exclusion in co-inhabited
patches or coinfected hosts. Impacts of more gradual competitive exclusion
on the abundance, distribution, and diversity of species are less clear.
Here, we nest a general resource competition model within a metacommunity
framework and manipulate the relative timescales for processes operating
within and among patches/hosts. We focus on superinfection in pathogen
communities. We compare cases where transmission depends on infection
prevalence versus the abundance of pathogens within hosts. Surprisingly,
slowing the relative pace of competitive exclusion within hosts can
decrease infection prevalence of the inferior competitor and increase
prevalence of the superior competitor, depending on transmission and
virulence. Slower dynamics reduce the abundance of both pathogens within
hosts and promote diversity at multiple scales: coinfections within
individual hosts and co-occurrence in the host population. These results
highlight surprising feedbacks that can emerge across scales and reinforce
the rich cross-scale connections between community and disease ecology.