Understanding climate change threats to vertebrate wildlife by studying ecoimmunology across biological scales.

Authors

Anna C Fagre, Daniel J Becker, Laura A Pulscher, Molly C Simonis, Colleen G Duncan

Published in

Integrative and comparative biology. Aug 20, 2025. Epub Aug 20, 2025.

Abstract

Climate change threatens organismal health and ecological stability in myriad ways, the impacts of which are often difficult to characterize given their complex and interacting nature. To facilitate comparisons across taxa and ecosystems, we discuss the importance of a cross-scale approach to better characterize the ways in which climate change processes threaten wildlife immunity. Centering available examples from the vertebrate wildlife literature, we supplement with examples from the livestock literature to illustrate ways in which abiotic stress impacts immunity from molecular to community scales of biological organization. To highlight opportunities for cross-scale integration, we present a series of vignettes-drought, temperature extremes, storms and flooding, and habitat alterations and shifts-prior to discussing the complexities inherent to studying multiple interacting threats using heavy metal contamination as an example. Finally, we outline mechanisms by which collaborations across disciplines and sectors can continue strengthening capacity for studying the drivers of climate change-associated threats to wildlife immunology.

PMID:
40833629
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 20 Aug 2025.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.