Publications
79 results found
Smith TP, Clegg T, Ransome E, et al., 2024, High-throughput characterization of bacterial responses to complex mixtures of chemical pollutants., Nat Microbiol
Our understanding of how microbes respond to micropollutants, such as pesticides, is almost wholly based on single-species responses to individual chemicals. However, in natural environments, microbes experience multiple pollutants simultaneously. Here we perform a matrix of multi-stressor experiments by assaying the growth of model and non-model strains of bacteria in all 255 combinations of 8 chemical stressors (antibiotics, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides). We found that bacterial strains responded in different ways to stressor mixtures, which could not be predicted simply from their phylogenetic relatedness. Increasingly complex chemical mixtures were both more likely to negatively impact bacterial growth in monoculture and more likely to reveal net interactive effects. A mixed co-culture of strains proved more resilient to increasingly complex mixtures and revealed fewer interactions in the growth response. These results show predictability in microbial population responses to chemical stressors and could increase the utility of next-generation eco-toxicological assays.
Pawar S, Huxley PJ, Smallwood TRC, et al., 2024, Variation in temperature of peak trait performance constrains adaptation of arthropod populations to climatic warming., Nat Ecol Evol, Vol: 8, Pages: 500-510
The capacity of arthropod populations to adapt to long-term climatic warming is currently uncertain. Here we combine theory and extensive data to show that the rate of their thermal adaptation to climatic warming will be constrained in two fundamental ways. First, the rate of thermal adaptation of an arthropod population is predicted to be limited by changes in the temperatures at which the performance of four key life-history traits can peak, in a specific order of declining importance: juvenile development, adult fecundity, juvenile mortality and adult mortality. Second, directional thermal adaptation is constrained due to differences in the temperature of the peak performance of these four traits, with these differences expected to persist because of energetic allocation and life-history trade-offs. We compile a new global dataset of 61 diverse arthropod species which provides strong empirical evidence to support these predictions, demonstrating that contemporary populations have indeed evolved under these constraints. Our results provide a basis for using relatively feasible trait measurements to predict the adaptive capacity of diverse arthropod populations to geographic temperature gradients, as well as ongoing and future climatic warming.
Terlau JF, Brose U, Boy T, et al., 2023, Predicting movement speed of beetles from body size and temperature, MOVEMENT ECOLOGY, Vol: 11, ISSN: 2051-3933
Pawar S, 2023, Another step towards a unifying theory for ecosystems?, JOURNAL OF BIOSCIENCES, Vol: 48, ISSN: 0250-5991
Garcia FC, Clegg T, O'Neill DB, et al., 2023, The temperature dependence of microbial community respiration is amplified by changes in species interactions, NATURE MICROBIOLOGY, Vol: 8, Pages: 272-283, ISSN: 2058-5276
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- Citations: 3
Smith T, Mombrikotb S, Ransome E, et al., 2022, Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to temperature fluctuations, eLife, Vol: 11, Pages: 1-22, ISSN: 2050-084X
How complex microbial communities respond to climatic fluctuations remains an open question. Due to their relatively short generation times and high functional diversity, microbial populations harbor great potential to respond as a community through a combination of strain-level phenotypic plasticity, adaptation, and species sorting. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms remains unclear. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the degree to which bacterial communities can respond to changes in environmental temperature through a combination of phenotypic plasticity and species sorting alone. We grew replicate soil communities from a single location at six temperatures between 4°C and 50°C. We found that phylogenetically and functionally distinct communities emerge at each of these temperatures, with K-strategist taxa favored under cooler conditions and r-strategist taxa under warmer conditions. We show that this dynamic emergence of distinct communities across a wide range of temperatures (in essence, community-level adaptation) is driven by the resuscitation of latent functional diversity: the parent community harbors multiple strains pre-adapted to different temperatures that are able to ‘switch on’ at their preferred temperature without immigration or adaptation. Our findings suggest that microbial community function in nature is likely to respond rapidly to climatic temperature fluctuations through shifts in species composition by resuscitation of latent functional diversity.
Terlau J, Brose U, Antunes AC, et al., 2022, Integrating trait-based movement into mechanistic predictions of thermal performance
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Despite the diversity and functional importance of invertebrates, predicting their response to global warming remains challenging as it requires extensive measurements of physiological performance or rarely available high-resolution distribution data. Mechanistic models can help overcome these limitations by generalizing fundamental physiological processes. However, their predictions typically omit the effects of species interactions. Movement is a key process of species interactions underpinning animal performance in the real world. Here, we developed an empirically-grounded mechanistic model that incorporates allometric and thermodynamic constraints on movement and predator-prey interactions. We illustrate how it can be used to quantify the thermal performance of invertebrates under current and future climatic conditions. This trait-based approach (1) contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying thermal fitness, (2) allows generalized predictions of thermal performance across invertebrate species worldwide and (3) can be used to inform species distribution models and thereby help infer species range limits under climate change.</jats:p>
Christensen AK, Piggott M, van Sebille E, et al., 2022, Investigating microscale patchiness of motile microbes under turbulence in a simulated convective mixed layer, PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY, Vol: 18, ISSN: 1553-734X
Kordas RL, Pawar S, Kontopoulos D-G, et al., 2022, Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming, NATURE COMMUNICATIONS, Vol: 13
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- Citations: 4
Phillips JA, Soto JSV, Pawar S, et al., 2022, The effects of phylogeny, habitat and host characteristics on the thermal sensitivity of helminth development, PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, Vol: 289, ISSN: 0962-8452
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- Citations: 4
Huxley PJ, Murray KA, Pawar S, et al., 2022, Competition and resource depletion shape the thermal response of population fitness in <i>Aedes aegypti</i>, COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY, Vol: 5
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- Citations: 4
Woodward G, Morris O, Barquin J, et al., 2021, Using food webs and metabolic theory to monitor, model, and manage Atlantic salmon - a keystone species under threat, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol: 9, ISSN: 2296-701X
Populations of Atlantic salmon are crashing across most of its natural range: understanding the underlying causes and predicting these collapses in time to intervene effectively are urgent ecological and socioeconomic priorities. Current management techniques rely on phenomenological analyses of demographic population time-series and thus lack a mechanistic understanding of how and why populations may be declining. New multidisciplinary approaches are thus needed to capitalize on the long-term, large-scale population data that are currently scattered across various repositories in multiple countries, as well as marshaling additional data to understand the constraints on the life cycle and how salmon operate within the wider food web. Here, we explore how we might combine data and theory to develop the mechanistic models that we need to predict and manage responses to future change. Although we focus on Atlantic salmon—given the huge data resources that already exist for this species—the general principles developed here could be applied and extended to many other species and ecosystems.
Cook J, Pawar S, Endres R, 2021, Thermodynamic constraints on the assembly and diversity of microbial ecosystems are different near to and far from equilibrium, PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY, Vol: 17, ISSN: 1553-734X
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- Citations: 3
Ho H-C, Pawar S, Tylianakis JM, 2021, Less is worse than none: ineffective adaptive foraging can destabilise food webs
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p><jats:list list-type="order"><jats:list-item><jats:p>Consumers can potentially adjust their diet in response to changing resource abundances, thereby achieving better foraging payoffs. Although previous work has explored how such adaptive foraging scales up to determine the structure and dynamics of food webs, consumers may not be able to perform perfect diet adjustment due to sensory or cognitive limitations. Whether the effectiveness of consumers’ diet adjustment alters food-web consequences remains unclear.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>Here, we study how adaptive foraging, specifically the effectiveness (i.e. rate) with which consumers adjust their diet, influences the structure, dynamics, and overall species persistence in synthetic food webs.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We model metabolically-constrained optimal foraging as the mechanistic basis of adaptive diet adjustment and ensuing population dynamics within food webs. We compare food-web dynamical outcomes among simulations sharing initial states but differing in the effectiveness of diet adjustment.</jats:p></jats:list-item><jats:list-item><jats:p>We show that adaptive diet adjustment generally makes food-web structure resilient to species loss. Effective diet adjustment that maintains optimal foraging in the face of changing resource abundances facilitates species persistence in the community, particularly reducing the extinction of top consumers. However, a greater proportion of intermediate consumers goes extinct as optimal foraging becomes less-effective and, unexpectedly, slow diet adjustment leads to higher extinction rates than no diet adjustment at all. Therefore, food-web responses cannot be predicted from species’ responses in isolation, as even less-effective adaptive foraging benefits i
Kenna D, Pawar S, Gill R, 2021, Thermal flight performance reveals impact of warming on bumblebee foraging potential, Functional Ecology, Vol: 35, Pages: 2508-2522, ISSN: 0269-8463
1. The effects of environmental temperature on components of insect flight determine life history traits, fitness, adaptability, and ultimately, organism ecosystem functional roles. Despite the crucial role of flying insects across landscapes, our understanding of how temperature affects insect flight performance remains limited.2. Many insect pollinators are considered under threat from climatic warming. Quantifying the relationship between temperature and behavioural performance traits allows us to understand where species are operating in respect to their thermal limits, helping predict responses to projected temperature increases and/or erratic weather events.3. Using a tethered flight mill, we quantify how flight performance of a widespread bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, varies over a temperature range (12-30oC). Given that body mass constrains insect mobility and behaviour, bumblebees represent a useful system to study temperature-mediated size-dependence of flight performance owing to the large intra-colony variation in worker body size they exhibit..4. Workers struggled to fly over a few hundred metres at the lowest tested temperature of 12oC, however flight endurance increased as temperatures rose, peaking around 25oC after which it declined. Our findings further revealed variation in flight capacity across the workforce, with larger workers flying further, longer, and faster than their smaller nestmates. Body mass was also positively related with the likelihood of flight, although importantly this relationship became stronger as temperatures cooled, such that at 12oC only the largest workers were successful fliers. Our study thus highlights that colony foraging success under variable thermal environments can be dependent on the body mass distribution of constituent workers, and more broadly suggests smaller-bodied insects may benefit disproportionately more from warming than larger-bodied ones in terms of flight performance.5. By incorporating both flight e
Lechon-Alonso P, Clegg T, Cook J, et al., 2021, The role of competition versus cooperation in microbial community coalescence, PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY, Vol: 17, ISSN: 1553-734X
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- Citations: 6
Smith TP, Clegg T, Bell T, et al., 2021, Systematic variation in the temperature dependence of bacterial carbon use efficiency, ECOLOGY LETTERS, Vol: 24, Pages: 2123-2133, ISSN: 1461-023X
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- Citations: 9
Kordas R, Pawar S, Woodward G, et al., 2021, Metabolic plasticity can amplify ecosystem responses to global warming
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Organisms have the capacity to alter their physiological response to warming through acclimation or adaptation, but empirical evidence for this metabolic plasticity across species within food webs is lacking, and a generalisable framework does not exist for modelling its ecosystem-level consequences. Here we show that the ability of organisms to raise their metabolic rate following chronic exposure to warming decreases with increasing body size. Chronic exposure to higher temperatures also increases the sensitivity of organisms to short-term warming, irrespective of their body size. A mathematical model parameterised with these findings shows that metabolic plasticity could account for an additional 60% of ecosystem energy flux with just +2 °C of warming. This could explain why ecosystem respiration continues to rise in long-term warming experiments and highlights the need to embed metabolic plasticity in predictive models of global warming impacts on ecosystems.</jats:p>
Christensen A, Piggott M, Sebille EV, et al., 2021, Investigating microscale patchiness of motile microbes driven by the interaction of turbulence and gyrotaxis in a 3D simulated convective mixed layer.
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Microbes play a primary role in aquatic ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. Spatial patchiness is a critical factor underlying these activities, influencing biological productivity, nutrient cycling and dynamics across trophic levels. Incorporating spatial dynamics into microbial models is a long-standing challenge, particularly where small-scale turbulence is involved. Here, we combine a fully 3D direct numerical simulation of convective mixed layer turbulence, with an individual-based microbial model to test the key hypothesis that the coupling of gyrotactic motility and turbulence drives intense microscale patchiness. The fluid model simulates turbulent convection caused by heat loss through the fluid surface, for example during the night, during autumnal or winter cooling or during a cold-air outbreak. We find that under such conditions, turbulence-driven patchiness is depth-structured and requires high motility: Near the fluid surface, intense convective turbulence overpowers motility, homogenising motile and non-motile microbes approximately equally. At greater depth, in conditions analogous to a thermocline, highly motile microbes can be over twice as patch-concentrated as non-motile microbes, and can substantially amplify their swimming velocity by efficiently exploiting fast-moving packets of fluid. Our results substantiate the predictions of earlier studies, and demonstrate that turbulence-driven patchiness is not a ubiquitous consequence of motility but rather a delicate balance of motility and turbulent intensity.</jats:p>
Jackson MC, Pawar S, Woodward G, 2021, The temporal dynamics of multiple stressor effects: from individuals to ecosystems, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol: 36, Pages: 402-410, ISSN: 0169-5347
Multiple stressors, such as warming and invasions, often occur together and have nonadditive effects. Most studies to date assume that stressors operate in perfect synchrony, but this will rarely be the case in reality. Stressor sequence and overlap will have implications for ecological memory - the ability of past stressors to influence future responses. Moreover, stressors are usually defined in an anthropocentric context: what we consider a short-term stressor, such as a flood, will span multiple generations of microbes. We argue that to predict responses to multiple stressors from individuals to the whole ecosystem, it is necessary to consider metabolic rates, which determine the timescales at which individuals operate and therefore, ultimately, the ecological memory at different levels of ecological organization.
Huxley PJ, Murray KA, Pawar S, et al., 2021, The effect of resource limitation on the temperature-dependence of mosquito population fitness, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol: 288, ISSN: 0962-8452
Laboratory-derived temperature dependencies of life history traits are increasingly being usedto make mechanistic predictions for how climatic warming will affect vector-borne diseasedynamics, partially by affecting abundance dynamics of the vector population. Thesetemperature-trait relationships are typically estimated from juvenile populations reared onoptimal resource supply, even though natural populations of vectors are expected toexperience variation in resource supply, including intermittent resource limitation. Usinglaboratory experiments on the mosquito Aedes aegypti, a principal arbovirus vector,combined with stage-structured population modelling, we show that low-resource supply inthe juvenile life stages significantly depresses the vector’s maximal population growth rateacross the entire temperature range (22–32°C) and causes it to peak at a lower temperaturethan at high-resource supply. This effect is primarily driven by an increase in juvenilemortality and development time, combined with a decrease in adult size with temperature atlow-resource supply. Our study suggests that most projections of temperature-dependentvector abundance and disease transmission are likely to be biased because they are based ontraits measured under optimal resource supply. Our results provide compelling evidence forfuture studies to consider resource supply when predicting the effects of climate and habitatchange on vector-borne disease transmission, disease vectors and other arthropods.
Cook J, Pawar S, Endres RG, 2021, Thermodynamic constraints on the assembly and diversity of microbial ecosystems are different near to and far from equilibrium
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. However, most of this interest has focused on developing coarse ecosystem-level maximisation principles, providing little insight into underlying mechanisms that lead to such emergent constraints. Microbial communities are a natural system to decipher this mechanistic basis because their interactions in the form of substrate consumption, metabolite production, and cross-feeding can be described explicitly in thermodynamic terms. Previous work has considered how thermodynamic constraints impact competition between pairs of species, but restrained from analysing how this manifests in complex dynamical systems. To address this gap, we develop a thermodynamic microbial community model with fully reversible reaction kinetics, which allows direct consideration of free-energy dissipation. This also allows species to interact via products rather than just substrates, increasing the dynamical complexity, and allowing a more nuanced classification of interaction types to emerge. Using this model, we find that community diversity increases with substrate lability, because greater free-energy availability allows for faster generation of niches. Thus, more niches are generated in the time frame of community establishment, leading to higher final species diversity. We also find that allowing species to make use of near-to-equilibrium reactions increases diversity in a low free-energy regime. In such a regime, two new thermodynamic interaction types that we identify here reach comparable strengths to the conventional (competition and facilitation) types, emphasising the key role that thermodynamics plays in community dynamics. Our results suggest that accounting for realistic thermodynamic constraints is vital fo
Smith TP, Mombrikotb S, Ransome E, et al., 2021, Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to environmental fluctuations, Publisher: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Whether and how whole ecological communities can respond to climate change remains an open question. With their fast generation times and abundant functional diversity, microbes in particular harbor great potential to exhibit community-level adaptation through a combination of strain-level adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, and species sorting. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms remains unclear. Here, through a novel laboratory experiment, we show that bacterial communities can exhibit a remarkable degree of community-level adaptability through a combination of phenotypic plasticity and species sorting alone. Specifically, by culturing soil communities from a single location at six temperatures between 4°C and 50°C, we find that multiple strains well adapted to different temperatures can be isolated from the community, without immigration or strain-level adaptation. This is made possible by the ability of strains with different physiological and life history traits to “switch on” under suitable conditions, with phylogenetically distinct K-specialist taxa favoured under cooler conditions, and r-specialist taxa in warmer conditions. Our findings provide new insights into microbial community adaptation, and suggest that microbial community function is likely to respond rapidly to climatic fluctuations, through changes in species composition during repeated community assembly dynamics.
Padfield D, O'Sullivan H, Pawar S, 2021, rTPC and nls.multstart: A new pipeline to fit thermal performance curves in r, METHODS IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, Vol: 12, Pages: 1138-1143, ISSN: 2041-210X
Zheng JX, Pawar S, Goodman DFM, 2021, Further towards unambiguous edge bundling: Investigating power-confluentdrawings for network visualization, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol: 27, Pages: 2244-2249, ISSN: 1077-2626
Bach et al. [1] recently presented an algorithm for constructing confluentdrawings, by leveraging power graph decomposition to generate an auxiliaryrouting graph. We identify two problems with their method and offer a singlesolution to solve both. We also classify the exact type of confluent drawingsthat the algorithm can produce as 'power-confluent', and prove that it is asubclass of the previously studied 'strict confluent' drawing. A descriptionand source code of our implementation is also provided, which additionallyincludes an improved method for power graph construction.
Christensen A, Piggott M, Sebille EV, et al., 2021, Small-scale convective turbulence constrains microbial patchiness
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Microbes play a primary role in aquatic ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. Patchiness is a critical component of these activities, influencing biological productivity, nutrient cycling and dynamics across trophic levels. Incorporating spatial dynamics into microbial models is a long-standing challenge, particularly where small-scale turbulence is involved. Here, we combine a realistic simulation of turbulence with an individual-based microbial model to test the key hypothesis that the coupling of motility and turbulence drives intense microscale patchiness. We find that such patchiness is depth-structured and requires high motility: Near the fluid surface, strong convective turbulence overpowers motility, homogenising motile and non-motile microbes equally. In deeper, thermocline-like conditions, highly motile microbes are up to 1.6-fold more patch-concentrated than non-motile microbes. Our results demonstrate that the delicate balance of turbulence and motility that triggers micro-scale patchiness is not a ubiquitous consequence of motility, and that the intensity of such patchiness in real-world conditions is modest.</jats:p>
Ho H-C, Tylianakis JM, Pawar S, 2020, Behaviour moderates the impacts of food-web structure on species coexistence, Ecology Letters, Vol: 24, Pages: 298-309, ISSN: 1461-023X
How species coexistence (mathematical ‘feasibility’) in food webs emerges from species' trophic interactions remains a long‐standing open question. Here we investigate how structure (network topology and body‐size structure) and behaviour (foraging strategy and spatial dimensionality of interactions) interactively affect feasibility in food webs. Metabolically‐constrained modelling of food‐web dynamics based on whole‐organism consumption revealed that feasibility is promoted in systems dominated by large‐eat‐small foraging (consumers eating smaller resources) whenever (1) many top consumers are present, (2) grazing or sit‐and‐wait foraging strategies are common, and (3) species engage in two‐dimensional interactions. Congruently, the first two conditions were associated with dominance of large‐eat‐small foraging in 74 well‐resolved (primarily aquatic) real‐world food webs. Our findings provide a new, mechanistic understanding of how behavioural properties can modulate the effects of structural properties on species coexistence in food webs, and suggest that ‘being feasible’ constrains the spectra of behavioural and structural properties seen in natural food webs.
Kontopoulos D-G, Smith TP, Barraclough TG, et al., 2020, Adaptive evolution shapes the present-day distribution of the thermal sensitivity of population growth rate, PLoS Biology, Vol: 18, ISSN: 1544-9173
Developing a thorough understanding of how ectotherm physiology adapts to different thermal environments is of crucial importance, especially in the face of global climate change. A key aspect of an organism's thermal performance curve (TPC)-the relationship between fitness-related trait performance and temperature-is its thermal sensitivity, i.e., the rate at which trait values increase with temperature within its typically experienced thermal range. For a given trait, the distribution of thermal sensitivities across species, often quantified as "activation energy" values, is typically right-skewed. Currently, the mechanisms that generate this distribution are unclear, with considerable debate about the role of thermodynamic constraints versus adaptive evolution. Here, using a phylogenetic comparative approach, we study the evolution of the thermal sensitivity of population growth rate across phytoplankton (Cyanobacteria and eukaryotic microalgae) and prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea), 2 microbial groups that play a major role in the global carbon cycle. We find that thermal sensitivity across these groups is moderately phylogenetically heritable, and that its distribution is shaped by repeated evolutionary convergence throughout its parameter space. More precisely, we detect bursts of adaptive evolution in thermal sensitivity, increasing the amount of overlap among its distributions in different clades. We obtain qualitatively similar results from evolutionary analyses of the thermal sensitivities of 2 physiological rates underlying growth rate: net photosynthesis and respiration of plants. Furthermore, we find that these episodes of evolutionary convergence are consistent with 2 opposing forces: decrease in thermal sensitivity due to environmental fluctuations and increase due to adaptation to stable environments. Overall, our results indicate that adaptation can lead to large and relatively rapid shifts in thermal sensitivity, especially in microbes f
Kontopoulos D-G, Patmanidis I, Barraclough TG, et al., 2020, Higher temperatures worsen the effects of mutations on protein stability
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Understanding whether and how temperature increases alter the effects of mutations on protein stability is crucial for understanding the limits to thermal adaptation by organisms. Currently, it is generally assumed that the stability effects of mutations are independent of temperature. Yet, mutations should become increasingly destabilizing as temperature rises due to the increase in the energy of atoms. Here, by performing an extensive computational analysis on the essential enzyme adenylate kinase in prokaryotes, we show, for the first time, that mutations become more destabilizing with temperature both across and within species. Consistent with these findings, we find that substitution rates of prokaryotes decrease nonlinearly with temperature. Our results suggest that life on Earth likely originated in a moderately thermophilic and thermally fluctuating environment, and indicate that global warming should decrease the per-generation rate of molecular evolution of prokaryotes.</jats:p>
Cator L, Johnson LR, Mordecai EA, et al., 2020, The role of vector trait variation in vector-borne disease dynamics, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, Vol: 8, ISSN: 2296-701X
Many important endemic and emerging diseases are transmitted by vectorsthat are biting arthropods. The functional traits of vectors can affect pathogen transmission ratesdirectly andalso through their effect on vector population dynamics. Increasing empirical evidence shows that vector traits vary significantlyacross individuals, populations, and environmental conditions, andat time scales relevant to disease transmission dynamics. Here, we review empirical evidence for variation invector traits and how this trait variation is currentlyincorporated into mathematical modelsof vector-borne disease transmission. We argue that mechanistically incorporating trait variationinto these models, by explicitly capturingits effects on vector fitness and abundance, can improve the reliability oftheir predictions in a changing world. We provide a conceptual framework for incorporating trait variation into vector-borne disease transmission models,and highlight key empirical and theoretical challenges.This framework provides a means to conceptualize how traits can be incorporated in Vector Borne Disease systems,and identifies key areas in which trait variation can be explored. Determining when and to what extent it is important to incorporate trait variation into vector borne disease models remainsan important, outstanding question.
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