Abstract: Many infectious diseases of recent concern, including malaria, cholera, plague, and Lyme disease, have emerged from complex ecological communities involving multiple hosts and their associated parasites. Several of these diseases appear to be influenced by human impacts on the environment, for example intensive agriculture, clear-cut forestry, and habitat loss, and fragmentation. Such environmental impacts may affect many species at trophic levels below or above the host community. Thus, the prevalence of both human and wildlife diseases may alter in unanticipated ways as a result of changes in the structure and composition of ecological communities. This book highlights exciting advances in theoretical and empirical research aimed towards a better understanding of the importance of community structure in the emergence of infectious diseases. To date, research on host-parasite systems has tended to explore only a limited set of community interactions, and little effort has been devoted to addressing complications, such as multiple-host-multiple-parasite systems; sequential hosts acting on different trophic levels; alternate hosts with spatially varying interactions; or stochastic effects resulting from small population size in at least one alternate host species. The chapters in this book illustrate aspects of community ecology that influence pathogen transmission rates and disease dynamics in a wide variety of study systems. It communicates a clear message: studies of epidemiology can be approached from the perspective of community ecology, and students of community ecology can contribute significantly to epidemiology.

Keywords: pathogen, parasite, disease, community ecology, interactions, diversity, stochastic, environmental impacts, reservoir, host