Destination Areas (DAs)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10919/78628
Destination Areas provide faculty and students with new tools to identify and solve complex, 21st-century problems in which Virginia Tech already has significant strengths and can take a global leadership role. The initiative represents the next step in the evolution of the land-grant university to meet economic and societal needs of the world.

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Browsing Destination Areas (DAs) by Subject "0602 Ecology"

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    Synergistic China-US Ecological Research is Essential for Global Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness
    Smiley Evans, Tierra; Shi, Zhengli; Boots, Michael; Liu, Wenjun; Olival, Kevin J.; Xiao, Xiangming; VandeWoude, Sue; Brown, Heidi E.; Chen, Ji-Long; Civitello, David J.; Escobar, Luis E.; Grohn, Yrjo; Li, Hongying; Lips, Karen; Liu, Qiyoung; Lu, Jiahai; Martinez-Lopez, Beatriz; Shi, Jishu; Shi, Xiaolu; Xu, Biao; Yuan, Lihong; Zhu, Guoqiang; Getz, Wayne M. (Springer, 2020-02-03)
    The risk of a zoonotic pandemic disease threatens hundreds of millions of people. Emerging infectious diseases also threaten livestock and wildlife populations around the world and can lead to devastating economic damages. China and the USA—due to their unparalleled resources, widespread engagement in activities driving emerging infectious diseases and national as well as geopolitical imperatives to contribute to global health security—play an essential role in our understanding of pandemic threats. Critical to efforts to mitigate risk is building upon existing investments in global capacity to develop training and research focused on the ecological factors driving infectious disease spillover from animals to humans. International cooperation, particularly between China and the USA, is essential to fully engage the resources and scientific strengths necessary to add this ecological emphasis to the pandemic preparedness strategy. Here, we review the world’s current state of emerging infectious disease preparedness, the ecological and evolutionary knowledge needed to anticipate disease emergence, the roles that China and the USA currently play as sources and solutions to mitigating risk, and the next steps needed to better protect the global community from zoonotic disease.
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    Thermal biology of mosquito-borne disease
    Mordecai, Erin A.; Caldwell, Jamie M.; Grossman, Marissa K.; Lippi, Catherine A.; Johnson, Leah R.; Neira, Marco; Rohr, Jason R.; Ryan, Sadie J.; Savage, Van; Shocket, Marta S.; Sippy, Rachel; Ibarra, Anna M. Stewart; Thomas, Matthew B.; Villena, Oswaldo (Wiley, 2019-07-08)
    Mosquito-borne diseases cause a major burden of disease worldwide. The vital rates of these ectothermic vectors and parasites respond strongly and nonlinearly to temperature and therefore to climate change. Here, we review how trait-based approaches can synthesise and mechanistically predict the temperature dependence of transmission across vectors, pathogens, and environments. We present 11 pathogens transmitted by 15 different mosquito species – including globally important diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika – synthesised from previously published studies. Transmission varied strongly and unimodally with temperature, peaking at 23–29ºC and declining to zero below 9–23ºC and above 32–38ºC. Different traits restricted transmission at low versus high temperatures, and temperature effects on transmission varied by both mosquito and parasite species. Temperate pathogens exhibit broader thermal ranges and cooler thermal minima and optima than tropical pathogens. Among tropical pathogens, malaria and Ross River virus had lower thermal optima (25–26ºC) while dengue and Zika viruses had the highest (29ºC) thermal optima. We expect warming to increase transmission below thermal optima but decrease transmission above optima. Key directions for future work include linking mechanistic models to field transmission, combining temperature effects with control measures, incorporating trait variation and temperature variation, and investigating climate adaptation and migration.