Understanding how landscapes and hosts shape pathogen spread is a fundamental challenge for disease ecologists. In wildlife, untangling which characteristics act as resistance or conductance to pathogen spread can provide important insights into pathogen transmission and host behaviour that can better inform disease management. However, the factors that shape resistance or conductance of a particular pathogen are likely to vary in anthropogenic landscapes compared to wild ones and are likely to be transmission mode specific. Here we apply an ecophylogenetic approach that: 1. characterizes genetic diversity and endemic spread of two retroviruses in puma populations (Puma concolor) in rural and urban Colorado, and 2: links host and pathogen genomic data to assess how landscape and host variables (e.g., relatedness) shape spread. We analysed two retroviruses with differing transmission modes; host-specific feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) and multi-host feline foamy virus (FFV). We compared the results of these differing pathogens to previous work looking at the gene flow of the host puma in the same landscapes.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results indicate that multiple subtypes of both pathogens were co-circulating in both populations at the same time. Subtype spread in both populations was not ‘wave like’ with individuals in close proximity infected by unrelated FFV and FIV lineages, and infected puma were often spatially intermixed with uninfected individuals. However, the genetic diversity of the host-specific FIV was much higher in the rural population compared to the population at the urban edge, and the opposite was true for the multi-host FFV. More broadly, results from this study provide evidence that urban landscapes can alter pathogen spread, but the specific landscape and host variables vary with transmission mode. This study provides novel insights into how host and landscape can alter pathogen spread in populations, and this has consequences for disease management in anthropogenic landscapes.