In my research I am interested in the disease-biodiversity relationship, which consists of 2 opposing theories: the Dilution and the Amplification effect. The first claims that biodiversity reduces disease prevalence, the latter that more hosts in a community can increase the disease prevalence.
The illustration below show an example of the Dilution effect for a hypothetical pathogen in a giraffe:
This shows that due to the difference in competence to the disease (the difference in susceptibility to the pathogen), a more diverse the community can have a lower disease prevalence due to contact replacement. However, since transmission is very complex, we investigate if this theory holds up when we include environmental transmission and taking into account abundances.
What makes this research stand out, is that we investigate the role of the hosts species evolutionary history, by defining the competence to the pathogen using phylogenies:
