Emily Flies

University of Tasmania · School of Plant Science

Just as ecological degradation contributes to many public health problems, restoration of these areas can be health-enabling not only for the environment but also for people. However, despite growing recognition of the positive relationships between ecological restoration and human health, knowledge gaps persist. Rural areas are most closely affect...

Exposure to diverse microbial communities early in life can help support healthy human immune function. Soil microbiomes in public and private urban green spaces are potentially important sources of contact with diverse microbiomes for much of the global population. However, we lack understanding of how soil microbial communities vary across and wi...

Environmental risk factors specific to urban areas lead to urban-associated diseases such as allergies, asthma and mental health disorders. To address these diseases, there has been a shift towards using urban nature as a preventative and therapeutic tool to restore and enhance human wellbeing.

The quantity of urban forests in cities is critical for biodiversity conservation and human health, and is known to be distributed unequally. Increasingly, the quality of urban forests are also being recognised as shaping the benefits they provide. Previous studies and reviews have demonstrated that the quality of urban green spaces is associated w...

A better understanding of the physical activity (PA) infrastructure in schools, the walkability of neighborhoods close to schools, and the food environments around schools, particularly in rural, socioeconomically challenged areas such as the North-West (NW) of Tasmania, could be important in the wider effort to improve the health of school-age chi...

The concentration of human population along coastlines has far-reaching effects on ocean and societal health. The oceans provide benefits to humans such as food, coastal protection and improved mental well-being, but can also impact negatively via natural disasters. At the same time, humans influence ocean health, for example, via coastal developme...

The world is becoming increasingly urbanised, impacting human interactions with natural environments (NEs). NEs take a number of forms, ranging from pristine, modified, to built NEs, which are common in many urban areas. NEs may include nature-based solutions, such as introducing nature elements and biological processes into cities that are used to...

Prevalence of physical inactivity and obesity continues to increase in regional areas such as North-West (NW) Tasmania and show no signs of abating. It is possible that limited access to physical activity infrastructure (PAI) and healthier food options are exacerbating the low levels of habitual physical activity and obesity prevalence in these com...

Some countries have been crippled by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic while others have emerged with few infections and fatalities; the factors underscoring this macro-epidemiological variation is one of the mysteries of this global catastrophe. Variation in immune responses influence SARS-CoV-2 transmission...

Reversing the spiralling trajectory of ecological degradation requires a profound paradigm shift that more explicitly links human and ecosystem health. Human health, as used here, includes wellbeing and livelihoods, which are largely determined by socio‐cultural, economic and environmental drivers. Ecological restoration and related restorative act...

Non-technical summary The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be ach...

The evidence base for the benefits of urban nature for people and biodiversity is strong. However, cities are diverse and the social and environmental contexts of cities are likely to influence the observed effects of urban nature, and the application of evidence to differing contexts. To explore biases in the evidence base for the effects of urban...

Biodiverse environments contribute to human health through a wide range of ecosystem services: from providing food and medicines to filtering our air and water. Exposure to biodiverse, airborne microbial communities (aerobiomes) contributes to the development of healthy human-immune function. This overlooked but potentially powerful ecosystem servi...

Campus community gardens (CCGs) can potentially improve student health and wellbeing, mitigate social and ecological problems, and nurture university-community relationships. However, CCGs are located in complex socio-political and ecological settings and many community gardens struggle or fail. However, few studies have assessed the socio-politica...

The sustainability concept in its current form suffers from reductionism. The common interpretation of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” fails to explicitly recognize their interdependence with needs of current and future non-human generations. Here we argue that the fo...

Bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms in the environment (i.e., environmental microbiomes) provide vital ecosystem services and affect human health. Despite their importance, public awareness of environmental microbiomes has lagged behind that of human microbiomes. A key problem has been a scarcity of research demonstrating the microbial connec...

Over half of people live in cities and while urban environments offer myriad social, cultural and economic benefits, they alter the microbial communities to which people are exposed: with potentially important but underexplored health impacts. In particular, higher rates of asthma and allergies in urban areas have been linked to urban-altered micro...

We are seemingly locked into a downward spiral of ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and a climate emergency. Ecological restoration aims to improve the ecological trajectory of degraded ecosystems. Ecosystem declines threaten human health. Dramatic changes in human behavior and government policy are essential, but will only occur through a...

Introduction: The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is the largest extant carnivorous marsupial. Since 1996, its population has declined by 77% primarily due to a clonal transmissible tumor, known as devil facial tumor (DFT1) disease. In 2014, a second transmissible devil facial tumor (DFT2) was discovered. DFT1 and DFT2 are nearly 100% fatal....

Background: Cities are home to over half the global population; that proportion is expected to rise to 70% by mid-century. The urban environment differs greatly from that in which humans evolved, with potentially important consequences for health. Rates for allergic, inflammatory and auto-immune diseases appear to rise with urbanization and be hig...

Urban green spaces are associated with many health outcomes, but the mechanisms underlying these links remain unclear. One explanation is that biodiverse microbiomes in green spaces affect human health by modifying immune function. Our systematic review included studies that investigated the relationship between green space and either health or bio...

Current evidence suggests that biodiverse environmental microbiomes contribute positively to human health and could account for known associations between urban green space and improved health. We summarise the state of knowledge that could inform the development of healthy urban microbiome initiatives (HUMI) to re-connect urban populations to biod...

We present a case study whereby ecological research on fallen trees in forest plots was advanced by a collaboration with astronomers working on the vector fields of stars and gas, and we propose a framework by which such novel collaborations can progress.

Predicting future food demand is a critical step for formulating the agricultural, economic and conservation policies required to feed over 9 billion people by 2050 while doing minimal harm to the environment. However, published future food demand estimates range substantially, making it difficult to determine optimal policies. Here we present a sy...

Ross River virus (RRV) is endemic to Australia and Papua New Guinea, with marsupials (especially macropods) as the primary reservoir hosts. Its geographic range was thought to be limited by the distribution of reservoir hosts, but recent evidence suggests that the virus can circulate endemically in the Pacific Islands, where marsupials are absent....

Background: Zoonotic vector-borne disease prevalence is affected by vector, human and reservoir host factors, which are influenced by habitat and climate; these five components interact on microhabitat to landscape scales but are often analyzed at a single spatial scale. Methods: We present an information theoretic, multi-scale, multiple regress...

The world is urbanizing and chronic health conditions associated with urban living are on the rise. There is mounting evidence that people with a diverse microbiome (bacteria that inhabit the human body) or who interact with green spaces enjoy better health. However, studies have yet to directly examine how biodiverse urban green spaces (BUGS) migh...

Social rank can profoundly affect many aspects of mammalian reproduction and stress physiology, but little is known about how immune function is affected by rank and other socio-ecological factors in free-living animals. 2.In this study we examine the effects of sex, social rank, and reproductive status on immune function in long-lived carnivores t...

Epidemiological studies use georeferenced health data to identify disease clusters but the accuracy of this georeferencing is obfuscated by incorrectly assigning the source of infection and by aggregating case data to larger geographical areas. Often, place of residence (residence) is used as a proxy for the source of infection (source) which may n...

Ross River virus (RRV) is responsible for the most notifications of human arboviral infection in Australia. Seroprevalence and experimental infection studies have implicated macropods (e.g., kangaroos) as the major reservoir hosts. However, transmission ecology varies spatially, and infections in urban areas have prompted the question of what anima...

Spatially and temporally accurate information about infectious mosquito distribution allows for pre-emptive public health interventions that can reduce the burden of mosquito-borne infections on human populations. However, the labile nature of arboviruses, the low prevalence of infection in mosquitoes, the expensive labor costs for mosquito identif...

Mosquito-borne diseases are a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. A significant obstacle to reducing the burden of these diseases is identifying where and when mosquito infection rates are highest. Honey-baited FTA cards have recently emerged as a sensitive and flexible technique for detecting arboviruses that are circulating in a giv...

Understanding the factors influencing mosquito distribution is important for effective surveillance and control of nuisance and disease vector mosquitoes. The goal of this study was to determine how trap height and distance to the city center influenced the abundance and species of mosquitoes collected in Adelaide, South Australia. Mosquito communi...

Anaplasma phagocytophilum (Dumler et al.) is the bacterial agent of human granulocytic anaplasmosis, an emerging infectious disease. The main vector of A. phagocytophilum in the United States is the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis (Say)) and various small and medium-sized mammals are reservoirs. Previous studies indicate that birds are exposed...