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Land use change and zoonotic spillover risk
A collaborative project: EcoHealth Alliance, Universidade Federal do ABC and Clark University
Project Summary
In 2023, the EcoHealth Alliance, ABC Federal University, and Clark University launched "Land use change, ecosystem resilience and zoonotic spillover risk" a project funded by NSF-Fapesp to increase our knowledge about the interactions between structural landscape change, biodiversity loss, changing functional diversity, and spillover risk. The results of this project will support policies and guidelines, particularly for forest restoration initiatives, in order to maintain and create multifunctional landscapes, which can conserve biodiversity and provide ecosystem services at the same time.
Our One Health Approach
EcoHealth Alliance's mission is based on the concept of One Health, which states that human health is deeply connected to, and thus dependent on, animal and environmental health. Our approach is inherently interdisciplinary and seeks to leverage a deeper understanding of human interactions with the natural world in order to prevent the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, and enhance human health.
Now, more than ever, it is imperative that human use of the natural environment acknowledges those links and the role that healthy ecosystems play in protecting human health. The COVID-19 outbreak has shown us first hand what is at stake. EHA's work in Brazil is designed to prevent exactly this kind of pandemic, and to rescue human health, and hopefully work as a blueprint for planning multifunctional landscapes that can harbor conservation and health.
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest was one of the largest rainforests of the Americas, originally covering around 112 million ha. However, after five decades of human expansion, it is one of the most threatened tropical ecosystems (Tabarelli et al., 2010), with only 32 million ha (28%) of remaining native vegetation (Rezende et al., 2018), in a highly fragmented state (Ribeiro et al., 2009). Despite high levels of forest loss, the Brazilian Atlantic Forest also includes hundreds of thousands of hectares of reforested areas per year (Rosa et al., 2021) to meet national and international restoration commitments.
The Atlantic Forest is home to a high concentration of endemic species (Myers et al., 2000), and is considered a biodiversity hotspot, which, together with the high rates of habitat loss, makes it also a hotspot for future emerging infectious diseases (Jones et al. 2008).
The presence of high biodiversity, increasing human pressure, in an emerging infectious disease hotspot, and under significant restoration initiatives make this ecoregion an ideal location for this study.
Forest Loss
Globally, we are losing about 4.7 million hectares of tropical forest every year, an area the size of the Dominican Republic or Slovakia, often to make space for agricultural commodities such as palm oil and beef. In addition, many remaining forests are being degraded for logging, firewood cutting, pollution and invasive pests. Wildfires, which are made worse by climate change, can also devastate forest ecosystems (FAO, 2020). Global deforestation reached its peak in the 1980s. We lost 150 million hectares – an area half the size of India – during that decade ( https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation) . Forest loss is being appointed as one of the main drivers of zoonotic disease risk.
Drivers of forest loss in tropical regions.
Forest Restoration
Restoring forest ecosystems involves returning trees to former forest land and improving the condition of degraded forests. As well as planting native tree species, it can include conserving wild plants and animals and protecting the soils and water sources that are part of the forest ecosystem. In existing forests, native species can be planted to regenerate the tree cover. In some cases, forest trees will re-grow naturally.
Countries when they reach economic growth tend to reforest more forests than they lose, known as the forest transition point. This happens when they achieve economic growth. However, 14% of the current forest loss is driven by rich countries, that ended up exporting their deforestation to poorer regions.
Forest restoration can be important for the persistence of native forest species (Strassburg et al., 2019), and the establishment of complex self-sustaining interactions between biota, biophysical features, and processes that compose an ecosystem (Falk et al., 2007; Suding et al., 2004). However, the potential benefits of forest restoration to zoonotic disease control have been inadequately studied (Prist et al., 2021).
Forest restoration sites in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.
Drivers of Spillover Risk
There is growing evidence that fragmented landscapes are hotspots for human-animal contact and can affect pathogen transmission patterns. In fact, land-use change can be linked to more than 40% of emerging infectious diseases. Land-use change is a global macro-ecological phenomenon, but the mechanisms through which it acts can occur at the smallest geographical scales. The ecological dynamics that govern infectious disease spread have evolved over millions of years, and so small changes in these systems can lead to huge consequences.
Our Goals
Global efforts to reduce the impacts of emerging diseases are primarily focused on post-emergence outbreak control. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, the extensive mortality and the economic costs associated reinforce the need for preventing the emergence of zoonotic diseases (Dobson et al., 2020; Bernstein et al., 2022). Forest restoration has become increasingly recognized as important to mitigate ecosystem services loss, including zoonotic disease outbreaks, and prevent future pandemics (Boriani et al., 2021; Mansuy, 2020). However, analysis of global data on disease emergence shows that the risk of novel zoonoses increases with both deforestation and reforestation (Allen et al., 2017).
We propose an integrative approach to evaluate the effects of landscape changes due to habitat loss and forest restoration on community composition, functional diversity, and pathogen spillover risk, including the development of a spatial spillover risk map for the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Aim 1). We also propose to evaluate how landscape structure influences the potential of forest restoration to recover functional biodiversity and the provision of disease regulation services (Aim 2).
Theoretical hypothesis of our project.
Our Partners
The Oswaldo Cruz Institute (IOC) has been acting for 120 years and has more than 70 laboratories specialized in environmental and epidemiological studies of infectious diseases. IOC is a partner in this project through the Laboratory of Biology and Parasitology of Wild Reservoir Mammals (LABPMR) and through the Laboratory of Comparative and Environmental Virology (LVCA).
Led by Dr. Paulo Sergio D'Andrea and Dr. Cecilia Andreazzi, the LABPMR has been acting for 39 years carrying out scientific expeditions for the collection of small mammals and their parasites in Brazil. LABPMR team also includes the researchers Dr. Ana Paula Lula Costa and Dr. Gisele Winck. Led by Dr. Marina Galvão Bueno, the LVCA develops projects for the monitoring and detection of viruses in wild and domestic animals, within the One Health approach.
The Laboratory of Diversity and Viral Diseases (LDDV) at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) has been working on the characterization of new viruses infecting the Brazilian fauna, mainly in mammals (primates, bats and small mammals), through new massive sequencing methodologies. LDDV is led by Dr. André Santos and Dr. Mirela D’arc, focusing on potential pathogens within the context of One Health and on acquiring knowledge to subsidize studies to better characterize the evolutionary history and origin of viral pathogens.
Clark University
The Geospatial Conservation Lab at Clark University is led by Dr. Flor Sangermano, and has as focus understanding the effect of anthropogenic changes, including climate and land cover, on the distribution of biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems, which is needed to promote effective conservation planning. The Lab’s research focuses on evaluating environmental and landscape changes, biodiversity modeling, and the assessment of ecosystem health, through the lens of spatial analysis, remote sensing, and ecoacoustics.
Universidade Federal do ABC
The research group led by Dr. Leandro Reverberi Tambosi at Universidade Federal do ABC is mainly focused on spatial ecology approaches to understand the effects of landscape arrangements on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The research projects conducted by the group are designed to generate knowledge and subsidize landscape conservation and restoration actions to foster biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services.
EcoHealth Alliance - what we are doing
The Conservation and Health team of EcoHealth Alliance aims to mitigate the effects of habitat loss and land use change on human health by ensuring the conservation of forests, the provision of ecosystem services, especially disease regulation, and the sustainable use of natural resources for populations.
Our team is led by Dr. Paula Prist , and is composed by the researchers Allison Bailey, and Victoria Kreinbrink.
Want to know more? See below other Conservation & Health projects around the world:
- Forest Fires and Indigenous Health in the Brazilian Amazon
- Malaria in Indonesia
- Forest Health Futures in Liberia
- Conservation works in Liberia