Frontiers in climate change–disease research

The notion that climate change will generally increase human and wildlife diseases has garnered considerable public attention, but remains controversial and seems inconsistent with the expectation that climate change will also cause parasite extinctions. In this review, we highlight the frontiers in climate change–infectious disease research by reviewing knowledge gaps that make this controversy difficult to resolve. We suggest that forecasts of climate-change impacts on disease can be improved by more interdisciplinary collaborations, better linking of data and models, addressing confounding variables and context dependencies, and applying metabolic theory to host–parasite systems with consideration of community-level interactions and functional traits. Finally, although we emphasize host–parasite interactions, we also highlight the applicability of these points to climate-change effects on species interactions in general.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution

• Publication date

  2011-04-12

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2011.03.002PMID 21481487PMCID 3374867
• 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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