{"doi":"10.1101/2020.12.01.406884","title":"Scaling effects of temperature on parasitism from individuals to host–parasite systems","abstract":"ABSTRACT Parasitism is expected to change in a warmer future, but whether warming leads to substantial increases in parasitism remains unclear. Understanding how warming effects on parasitism in individual hosts (e.g., parasite load) translate to effects on population-level parasitism (e.g., prevalence, R 0 ) remains a major knowledge gap. We analyzed the temperature dependence of parasitism at both host and population levels in thirteen empirical vector-borne host–parasite systems and found a strong, significant positive correlation between the thermal optima of individual- and population-level parasitism. We also found a significant, positive correlation in eleven environmentally-transmitted parasite systems, though several of these systems exhibited thermal optima >5ºC apart between individual and population levels. Similarly, parasitism thermal optima were close to host performance thermal optima in vector-borne systems but not in environmentally-transmitted systems. We then adapted and simulated simple models for both transmission modes and found a similar pattern to the empirical systems: thermal optima in vector-borne systems were more strongly correlated across scales compared to environmentally-transmitted systems. Generally, our results suggest that information on the temperature-dependence, and specifically the thermal optimum, at either the individual- or population-level should provide a useful—though not quantitatively exact—baseline for predicting temperature dependence at the other level, especially in vector-borne parasite systems. Environmentally-transmitted parasitism may operate by a different set of rules, in which temperature-dependence is decoupled in some systems, requiring the need for trait-based studies of temperature-dependence at individual and population levels.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":132424,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9416,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":588145,"name":"Mary I. O’Connor","orcid":"0000-0001-9583-1592","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230973,"name":"Erin A. Mordecai","orcid":"0000-0002-4402-5547","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":568876,"name":"Devin Kirk","orcid":"0000-0001-9588-1004","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":65,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:16:10.654971Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}