Habitat specialization by wildlife reduces pathogen spread in urbanizing landscapes

Urban areas are expanding globally, with far-reaching ecological consequences, including for wildlife-pathogen interactions. Wildlife show tremendous variation in their responses to urbanization; even within a single population, some individuals can specialize on urban or natural habitat types. This specialization could alter pathogen impacts on host populations via changes to wildlife movement and aggregation. Here, we build a mechanistic model to explore how habitat specialization in urban landscapes affects interactions between a mobile host population and a density-dependent specialist pathogen that confers no immunity. We model movement on a network of resource-stable urban sites and resource-fluctuating natural sites, where hosts are either urban specialists, natural specialists, or generalists that use both patch types. We find that, for generalists, natural and partially urban landscapes produce the highest infection prevalence and mortality, driven by high movement rates at nat...全球范围内城市区域持续扩张，由此引发的生态影响波及深远，其中亦涵盖野生动物与病原体的相互作用关系。野生动物对城市化的响应存在显著差异；即便在同一种群内部，部分个体也会特化于城市生境或自然生境类型。这种生境特化现象可通过改变野生动物的移动与聚集模式，进而影响病原体对宿主种群的作用效果。本研究构建了一套机制模型，用以探究城市景观中的生境特化如何影响移动宿主种群与一种不赋予宿主免疫力的密度依赖型专性病原体之间的相互作用。我们在资源稳定的城市斑块与资源波动的自然斑块构成的网络中模拟宿主移动，其中宿主可分为城市特化者、自然特化者，以及同时利用两类斑块的泛化者。研究结果显示，对于泛化宿主而言，自然景观与半城市化景观的感染率与死亡率最高，这一现象由自然生境中较高的移动速率所驱动……