BRS Greg Albery: How climate change drives disease emergence by altering animal behaviour

Shareable link: https://ubc.zoom.us/rec/share/S1KKtD144wzqwA1UasI0J2cPqQ5PDBkIeepzRX-nWsbGiFOzb5248G67BofpyVA-.FxXTDCEkppbnZkhT

Passcode: =6CAFWBJ 

host: Asher Leeks

Title talk: How climate change drives disease emergence by altering animal behaviour

Abstract: The climate is changing rapidly, accelerating our need to understand how its effects are altering the ecology of disease on a global stage. Because the climate influences animals’ behaviour across a wide range of scales, the effects of a warming world are expected to be diverse and wideranging, with important repercussions for wildlife health and animal-human interactions. Emergence of wildlife diseases into human populations is expected to change rapidly as a result. In this talk, I outline how climate change is influencing disease emergence via animal behaviour, drawing from a number of wild animal studies across a wide range of scales. I discuss micro-scale responses to environmental stress and acute natural disaster events, identifying how they influence socio-spatial behaviour and interactions among individuals, with complex and profound implications for epidemiology and spillover dynamics. Building to global scales, I move to discuss how a changing climate is altering the global mammal community via animals’ habitat selection behaviours, likely bringing new competent hosts into contact with important disease reservoirs, and possibly facilitating disease emergence as a result. In doing so, I outline a few of the diverse mechanisms by which climate change is facilitating spillover of well-known and novel diseases, presenting a vital frontier for our understanding of wildlife and human health in the Anthropocene.

Short biography: Greg Albery is a disease ecologist working at the intersection of animal behaviour, evolutionary ecology, and global change biology. As an Assistant Professor in animal behaviour at Trinity College Dublin, he specialises in spatial and social network analyses of individual-level wildlife systems, which he extends to broad, cross-system macroecological analyses involving dozens of wild animal populations. He did his undergraduate in Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford, followed by a PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh; he then held a postdoc at Georgetown University in Washington DC, a fellowship in Berlin, and an Assistant Research Professor position back at Georgetown, before moving to Trinity in 2024. The research institute 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 in 2022 was awarded an NSF Biology Integration Institute grant to establish a centre at Georgetown. He collaborates widely with researchers across the world, particularly in Georgetown, California, Edinburgh, Oxford, and Germany, carrying out spatial-social analyses on systems including deer, sheep, badgers, lions, songbirds, sharks, and primates. Currently, he is working on applying next-generation high-throughput data collection to identify animal-human interactions and predict disease risk, helping to achieve his goal of linking individual-level processes with their macroscopic consequences.