Disease-mediated ecosystem services: Pathogens, plants, and people.

Despite the ubiquity of pathogens in ecological systems, their roles in influencing ecosystem services are often overlooked. Pathogens that infect primary producers (i.e., plants, algae, cyanobacteria) can have particularly strong effects because autotrophs are responsible for a wide range of provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. We review the roles of pathogens in mediating ecosystem services provided by autotrophs and outline scenarios in which infection may lead to unexpected outcomes in response to global change. Our synthesis highlights a deficit of information on this topic, and we outline a vision for future research that includes integrative theory and cross-system empirical studies. Ultimately, knowledge about the mediating roles of pathogens on ecosystem services should inform environmental policy and practice.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution

• Publication date

  2020-06-15

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Business, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.TREE.2020.04.003PMID 32553885
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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