Emme Bruns & Janis Antonovics Publish in 'Journal of Ecology'

December 13, 2018

This month's Journal of Ecology incudes a paper by Emme Bruns, Janis Anotonovics and Michael Hood:  "Is there a disease‐free halo at species range limits? The codistribution of anther‐smut disease and its host species". The paper examines the distribution of a vector-transmitted, sterilizing disease across the elevational range of four alpine plant species, to test the hypothesis that diseases with vector transmission can persist in low-density populations near host range limits.  The results show that in all four cases, disease is present at high abundance near the limits of the host’s distribution, indicating that disease could play a role in determining species geographic distribution. Please click here to read the entire paper.