Abstract
Global change is shifting the timing of biological events, leading to temporal mismatches between biological events and resource availability. These temporal mismatches can threaten species’ populations. Importantly, temporal mismatches not only exert strong pressures on the population dynamics of the focal species, but can also lead to substantial changes in pairwise species interactions such as host–pathogen systems. We adapted an established individual‐based model of host–pathogen dynamics. The model describes a viral agent in a social host, while accounting for the host's explicit movement decisions. We aimed to investigate how temporal mismatches between seasonal resource availability and host life‐history events affect host–pathogen coexistence, that is, disease persistence. Seasonal resource fluctuations only increased coexistence probability when in synchrony with the hosts’ biological events. However, a temporal mismatch reduced host–pathogen coexistence, but only marginally. In tandem with an increasing temporal mismatch, our model showed a shift in the spatial distribution of infected hosts. It shifted from an even distribution under synchronous conditions toward the formation of disease hotspots, when host life history and resource availability mismatched completely. The spatial restriction of infected hosts to small hotspots in the landscape initially suggested a lower coexistence probability due to the critical loss of susceptible host individuals within those hotspots. However, the surrounding landscape facilitated demographic rescue through habitat‐dependent movement. Our work demonstrates that the negative effects of temporal mismatches between host resource availability and host life history on host–pathogen coexistence can be reduced through the formation of temporary disease hotspots and host movement decisions, with implications for disease management under disturbances and global change.
Highlights
Environmental fluctuations over time, like diurnal differences in temperature, seasonal changes of climate, or land-cover modifications due to agricultural practices, can affect species communities in many ways
This mismatch leads to a steady temporal shift of the optimal environmental conditions away from the biological event and can exert strong pressures on population dynamics (Altizer et al, 2006)
We gradually increased the level from 0% to 100% in 25% increments
Summary
Environmental fluctuations over time, like diurnal differences in temperature, seasonal changes of climate, or land-cover modifications due to agricultural practices, can affect species communities in many ways. A subsequent decline in population size could lead to a decreased coexistence of directly affected and any dependent species Such an asynchronous temporal resource availability, if occurring on landscapes with heterogeneous resource availability, could offset the negative effect of the temporal mismatch on coexistence by creating local patches with suitable conditions. There is a lack of theoretical studies linking the direct and indirect effects of global change-induced temporal mismatches on host–pathogen coexistence and dynamics through multiple scales, for example, spatial and temporal heterogeneity in resource availability and individual host movement (Meentemeyer et al, 2012; Rees et al, 2013; White et al, 2018a) Mechanisms underlying such a mismatch could lead to an increase, and to a decrease in host–pathogen coexistence: On the one hand, when applying autocorrelated temporal resource. We discuss our results in terms of consequences for disease persistence under climate and land-use change conditions that may be provoked by increasing asynchrony of relevant time scales
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