A virtual lecture presented by Greg Albery, PhD

Fire strongly affects animals’ behaviour, population dynamics, and environmental surroundings, all of which are likely to impact their immune systems and exposure to pathogens – however, little work has yet been conducted on the effects of wildfires on wildlife disease. This research gap is rapidly growing in importance because wildfires are becoming globally more common and more severe, with unknown impacts on wildlife disease and unclear implications for livestock and human health in the future. In this talk, I discuss how wildfires influence susceptibility and exposure to infection in wild animals, and the potential consequences for ecology and public health. In my framework, I outline how habitat loss and degradation caused by fire affect animals' immune defences, and how behavioural and demographic responses to fire affect pathogen exposure, spread, and maintenance. Finally, I discuss avenues for future investigations of fire-disease links, possible application of our knowledge, and the extension of the framework to a range of other natural disasters.

Bio: Greg Albery is a disease ecologist working at the intersection of animal behaviour, evolutionary ecology, and global change biology. He specialises in spatial and social network analyses of individual-level wildlife systems, and is increasingly applying this expertise to broad, cross-system macroecological datasets. The research consortium that he co-founded, Verena (viralemergence.org), is focused on connecting fundamental mechanisms of the host-virus network with global processes and pandemic risk, and was recently awarded an NSF Biology Integration Institute grant to establish a centre at Georgetown University. He is currently based between multiple institutions, including the University of Edinburgh, Georgetown University, and the Leibniz Institute in Berlin, Germany, where he also exists physically. Email: gfalbery@gmail.com

Part of the 2022 FERAL (Forest Ecology Random Lectures) Lecture Series, sponsored by the California Fire Science Consortium and the Safford Lab at the University of California-Davis.