Good Medicine for Conservation Biology: the Intersection of Epidemiology and Conservation Theory

Abstract: Infectious disease can be a concern for several aspects of conservation biology, such as determining threats to species, estimating population viability, and designing reserves, captive breeding, and recovery programs. Several measures are useful for describing infectious diseases in host populations, but it is not straightforward to determine the degree to which a particular disease may affect a host population. The most basic epidemiological theory suggests that populations should be least subject to host‐specific infectious disease when they are at low abundance (  paradoxically, the state at which they are in most need of conservation action). There are important exceptions, however, such as when a reservoir host exists or when Allee or stochastic effects occur. Several of the key threats to biodiversity—habitat alteration, introduced species, pollution, resource exploitation, and climate change—can facilitate and/or impair transmission of infectious disease. Common management tools such as population viability analysis rarely address infectious disease explicitly. We suggest that such an inclusion is both possible and warrante