Disease as a driver of bird decline

In light of dramatic declines in bird populations, our work addresses the overlooked role of wildlife disease, with particular attention to vector-borne and emerging viral pathogens.

Understanding the compounding effects of anthropogenic stressors (disease, urbanization, contaminants, and climate change) is essential for informing effective conservation and management. The lab uses immunological, transcriptomic, and population-level approaches to understand how wild populations become susceptible to disease, and how they adapt.

Two aims run through everything we do: understand the evolutionary mechanisms of immune response in the wild, and identify emerging disease drivers of wildlife decline in ways that inform management. Much of the fieldwork centers on waterfowl and waterbirds, which sit at the heart of avian influenza dynamics in North America.

When a novel pathogen is introduced to a wild population, one of two things happens. The population may have no innate immunity and experience high-virulence infection and mortality; or individuals may mount an adaptive response that produces tolerance or resistance to future infection. Determining the pathways behind those outcomes in natural infections is a pivotal step in understanding how host populations evolve in response to emerging disease.

We use transcriptomics and immunological assays on field-collected samples to characterize immune response across species and infection states, including work on how sampling and preservation methods affect the quality of the molecular data we can recover from wild birds.

The immunological and pathogenic response mechanisms of circulating H5N1 remain poorly understood across the diverse wild bird and mammal species now being affected. That gap is where much of our bench work sits.

Research that stays in the literature does not help a species in decline. We work with wildlife managers, decision scientists, agency partners, and stakeholders to build disease science into the decisions that actually get made, using structured decision making, value-of-information analysis, and quantitative modeling.

Ongoing and recent efforts include next-step frameworks for H5N1 science and management in North America, decision tools to assess loss during marine bird mortality events, and guidance on where limited surveillance and management effort produces the greatest conservation return.

Partnerships have included the U.S. Geological Survey Eastern Ecological Science Center, the University of Maryland, and state and federal wildlife agencies.