BioRodDis : Managing BIOdiversity in forests and urban green spaces

Dilution and amplification effects on RODent microbiomes and rodent-borne DISeases

Major advances in the understanding of infectious diseases have been achieved these last decades. However, the persistence and re-emergence of pathogens continue to raise public and veterinary health concerns, of which the recent COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the most dramatic recent examples. The role of biological diversity alteration in such cases has received a lot of attention, primarily because of the concomitant occurrence of habitat alteration and biodiversity loss with pathogen transmission and emergence from wildlife. Yet, scientists do not exactly understand how biodiversity changes disease dynamics and emergence. Understanding the relationships between wildlife biodiversity and zoonotic infectious diseases in a changing climate is a challenging and major issue of worldwide concern that scientists must address to help guide policy actions and response.

BioRodDis aims at tackling this challenge by promoting inter-disciplinarity and developing a trans-disciplinary research, i.e. a shared ecohealth conceptual framework, which draws on various theories, concepts, and approaches.

This project focuses on rodent-borne diseases in European temperate forests and urban parks. Rodents are important reservoirs of zoonotic agents; forests and urban green spaces are environments where rodents are abundant, and where human/domestic-wildlife interactions are likely to occur.

The main objectives will be to develop four promising and original research streams to understand the relationship between biodiversity and zoonotic infectious diseases:
• the impact of co-infections on epidemiology;
• the interactions between gut microbiome and host susceptibility to infectious agents;
• the influence of socio-economic contexts on human exposure to wildlife;
• the temporal variability of biodiversity/health relationships.

Overall, BioRodDis will provide proof-of-concept that joint strategies between public health and conservation biology programs can help to prevent emergence of zoonotic pathogens from wildlife including coronaviruses as needed.