A Practical Approach to Conservation

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Is conservation good for your health? Seems like a no-brainer, right?Not so much, according to a group of scientists who have collaborated on a new research volume that explores what turns out to be a very tough question.
UC Santa Barbara ecologists teamed up with colleagues at Duke University and the University of Washington to present various perspectives on the subject for the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Their special issue, “Conservation, Biodiversity, and Infectious Disease,” is a combination of theoretical work and case studies, all of which embrace a systems approach to infectious disease ecology.
“I’m a firm believer that insights from ecology can help us manage disease and protect species,” said co-editor Kevin Lafferty, a senior ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a principal investigator at UCSB’s Marine Science Institute. “But ecological systems are too complicated to expect one-size-fits-all solutions.”
The biodiversity-disease relationship often has been framed as a simple synergy between conservation action and improved human health, yet the links between habitat disturbance and other factors that affect disease risk are complex. The editors sought authors from diverse perspectives and backgrounds to investigate how economics, climate change and biodiversity change affect infectious diseases.
“What’s really unique about this issue is that we have gone all the way from theory articles that look at how biodiversity changes might affect disease to multiple field studies of various conservation interventions at different scales to an examination of the global drivers of biodiversity change,” said lead editor Hillary Young, an assistant professor in UCSB’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology (EEMB). “We wanted to present cases for viable and useful public health interventions.”
Take schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease carried by fresh water snails. Found predominantly in tropical and subtropical climates, schistosomiasis infects 240 million people in as many as 78 countries, with ...

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