Approximately 25 years ago, ecologists became increasingly interested in the question of
whether ongoing biodiversity loss matters for the functioning of ecosystems. As such, a new …

Global losses of biodiversity have galvanised efforts to understand how changes to
communities affect ecological processes, including transmission of infectious pathogens …

Virus evolution is the change in the genetic structure of a viral population over time and
results in the emergence of new viral variants, strains, and species with novel biological …

Disease emergence events regularly result from human activities such as agriculture, which
frequently brings large populations of genetically uniform hosts into contact with potential …

Highlights•New plant viruses diseases emerge periodically in crops.•These viruses jump
species from other crops, or from wild plants.•The role of biodiversity loss, or ecosystem …

Populations of large wildlife are declining on local and global scales. The impacts of this
pulse of size-selective defaunation include cascading changes to smaller animals …

Biodiversity loss may increase the risk of infectious disease in a phenomenon known as the
dilution effect. Circumstances that increase the likelihood of disease dilution are:(i) when …

All multicellular organisms host a diverse microbiome composed of microbial pathogens,
mutualists, and commensals, and changes in microbiome diversity or composition can alter …

As biodiversity declines with anthropogenic land-use change, it is increasingly important to
understand how changing biodiversity affects infectious disease risk. The dilution effect …

Biodiversity is thought to help regulate the impacts of disease through the dilution effect,
where biodiversity among potential host species helps limit the impacts of pathogens …