Estimating the number of host species that a parasite can infect (i.e. host range) can provide key insights into the evolution of host specialism and is a central concept in disease ecology. Further, large-scale patterns of parasite diversity or generality are strongly influenced by differential detection and sampling of parasite species, creating the need to estimate true host range. We examined the issue of host range estimation by applying non-parametric species richness estimators to both simulated and empirical parasite occurrence data.
Results/Conclusions
We demonstrated that host range can be estimated from simulated parasite occurrence data, and that between 20% and 40% of parasite host ranges based on the empirical data are currently unknown. Together, this highlights the utility of our estimation approach, while also clearly identifying a major gap in our understanding of parasite specificity, host–parasite network structure, and parasite burdens.