There is clear and growing evidence that anthropogenic impacts on our environment are impacting our quality of life. Spillovers of zoonotic diseases occur more frequently in degraded landscapes where contact between humans and wildlife increase. Restoration has been flagged as a key tool in our quest to redress some of the damage that has been done historically but there is very little known about
how restoration may protect against spillover risk. In addition, how mechanisms that link to spillover risk may play out in restoring landscapes has rarely been tested and given that human interaction with restored landscapes is likely to remain high or increase because of the restoration, this may represent a risky environment for spillover. In this talk I will touch on some of the previous work carried out investigating transmission dynamics in a wild rodent at the individual and population level and discuss a little bit about how we intend to extend this work in RESTOREID using a range of novel technological approaches, with the belief that leveraging innovations in other disciplines can be an incredibly powerful tool for ecological research.
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