Cohen, J. M., Sauer, E. L., Santiago, O., Spencer, S., & Rohr, J. R. (2020). Divergent impacts of warming weather on wildlife disease risk across climates. Science, 370 (6519).

Study Highlights:

A global, spatiotemporal dataset describing parasite prevalence across 7346 wildlife populations and 2021 host-parasite combinations was analyzed, compiling local weather and climate records at each location.

Hosts from cool climates experienced increased disease risk at abnormally warm temperatures, while hosts from warm climates experienced increased disease risk at abnormally cool temperatures- as predicted by the thermal mismatch hypothesis.

“The thermal mismatch hypothesis has emerged to predict how infection risk is affected by temperature across climate zones in an amphibian-disease system. This hypothesis suggests that hosts adapted to cooler and warmer climates should be at greatest risk of infection under abnormally warm and cool conditions, respectively.”

This effect was greatest in ectothermic hosts and similar in terrestrial and freshwater systems. Projections based on climate change models indicate that ectothermic wildlife hosts from temperate and tropical zones may experience sharp increases and moderate reductions in disease risk, respectively, though the magnitude of these changes depends on parasite identity.

This research was also featured in a news article by The Wildlife Society: Changing climate may worsen wildlife disease outbreaks