PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Nichole A. Laggan
AU  - Katy L. Parise
AU  - J. Paul White
AU  - Heather M. Kaarakka
AU  - Jennifer A. Redell
AU  - John E. DePue
AU  - William H. Scullon
AU  - Joseph Kath
AU  - Jeffrey T. Foster
AU  - A. Marm Kilpatrick
AU  - Kate E. Langwig
AU  - Joseph R. Hoyt
TI  - Host abundance and heterogeneity in infectiousness determine extent of the environmental reservoir
AID  - 10.1101/2022.09.20.508714
DP  - 2022 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2022.09.20.508714
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/09/22/2022.09.20.508714.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2022/09/22/2022.09.20.508714.full
AB  - Environmental pathogen reservoirs exist for many globally important diseases and can fuel disease outbreaks, affect pathogen evolution, and increase the threat of host extinction. Differences in pathogen shedding among hosts can create mosaics of infection risk across landscapes by increasing pathogen contamination in high use areas. However, how the environmental reservoir establishes in multi-host communities and the importance of factors like host-specific infection and abundance in environmental contamination and transmission remain important outstanding questions. Here we examine how Pseudogymnoascus destructans, the fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome in bats, invades and establishes in the environment. We quantified dynamic changes in pathogen shedding, infection intensities, host abundance, and the subsequent propagule pressure imposed by each species within the community. We find that the initial establishment of the pathogen reservoir is driven by different species within the community than those that are responsible for maintaining the reservoir over time. Our results also show that highly shedding species do not always contribute the most to pathogen reservoirs. More broadly, we demonstrate how individual host shedding rates scale to influence landscape-level pathogen contamination.Open Research statement Data will be made available through the Dryad Digital Repository before publication or upon reviewer request.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.