{"doi":"10.1111/ecog.07684","title":"Disease ecology and pathogeography: Changing the focus to better interpret and anticipate complex environment–host–pathogen interactions","abstract":"Over the past 15 years, disease ecology has become a discipline in its own right. It is fundamentally based on training in ecology and evolution, with solid theoretical foundations and skills in computational biology and statistics, and it differs from a medical approach to the interpretation of disease. It is concerned with how species interactions, including host–pathogen relationships and environmental conditions (e.g. temperature and rainfall), affect patterns and processes of disease presence and spread, how pathogens impact host individuals, populations, communities, and ultimately ecosystem function (Ostfeld et al. 2008). Initially rooted in parasite ecology, particularly among researchers working on transmission cycles and host–disease population dynamics, disease ecology mainly focuses on parasitic and infectious diseases but is not exclusive to them (Ostfeld 2018). A booming subfield currently concerns research linking different areas such as infectious transmission, agriculture development, and development aid policies, notably in the world's poorest countries (Ngonghala et al. 2014). Unlike ecologists, disease ecologists focus on understanding the causes and consequences of the maintenance and transmission of pathogens in animal species, including humans, plants, and communities of species. It has become much more widespread in studies among wild animal species, also in their contacts with domestic species, e.g. livestock, and their interactions with human populations, and much less so in plant diseases and their transmission, which in some respects are the focus of more plant-pathology molecular-orientated research (Guégan et al. 2023a). We cannot say that the development of disease ecology has involved the gradual integration of several distinct lines of inquiry because it is the heir of ecology. It has an ecosystem-based approach and takes into account natural complexity (Johnson et al. 2015, Hassell et al. 2021, Petrone et al. 2023); it develops experimental methods in the laboratory or mesocosms and has an essential background in statistical and mathematical analysis. The spatial scales of disease ecology study are experimental or local and, depending on the questions posed, can extend to the most global scales (Guernier et al. 2004, Jones et al. 2008, Allen et al. 2017, Carlson et al. 2022). In the temporal domain, these can be daily or weekly studies or multi-decadal investigations, such as in disease population dynamics (Keeling and Rohani 2007). By definition, disease ecology is concerned with understanding patterns and processes on large spatial and temporal scales. It integrates different levels of life organization, i.e. from genes to the global ecosystem, which is not the case, or only to a limited extent, of medical and veterinary approaches (Ezenwa et al. 2015). Over the years, however, disease ecology has gained the confidence of other disciplines, particularly the medical and veterinary ones, and is now published in top-leading generalist journals (Mahon et al. 2024, Pfenning-Butterworth et al. 2024, Chevillon et al. 2024). Today, disease ecology is also challenging established dogmas in human and veterinary medicine, reconsidering several aspects of infectious transmission in-depth, raising the question of possible larger host species spectra, and questioning the origin and nature of pathogen virulence (Chevillon et al. 2024). We are happy to present this special issue on disease ecology in the journal Ecography. At least two other contributions recently published in Ecography could have contributed to this special issue in disease ecology. Both constitute remarkable illustrations of macro-scale studies on host–parasite interactions. They are: Latitudinal distributions of the species richness, phylogenetic diversity and functional diversity of fleas and their small mammalian hosts in four geographic quadrants by Krasnov and colleagues (Krasnov et al. 2023); and Continental-scale climatic gradients","journal":"Ecography","year":2024,"id":484751,"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":8,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9559,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":18481,"name":"Timothée Poisot","orcid":"0000-0002-0735-5184","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":639189,"name":"Barbara A. Han","orcid":"0000-0002-9948-3078","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1326924,"name":"Jesús Olivero","orcid":"0000-0003-1714-0360","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":636159,"name":"Jean‐François Guégan","orcid":"0000-0002-7218-107X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":71,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:07:42.971417Z","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":[]}