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Introduction
Additional affiliations
April 2021 - September 2022
February 2012 - January 2013
Education
August 2013 - August 2018
Publications
Publications (58)
Many of the world's most pressing issues, such as the emergence of zoonotic diseases, can only be addressed through interdisciplinary research. However, the findings of interdisciplinary research are susceptible to miscommunication among both professional and non-professional audiences due to differences in training, language, experience, and under...
Behavior and personality play a crucial role in the evolution and ecology of animal species. We have limited knowledge of bat personality traits, partially due to the time, equipment, and facilities needed to measure them. To help fill this gap, we developed a scale for quantifying aggressiveness in bats that can be used during ordinary fieldwork a...
Syndromic surveillance, the monitoring of non-specific indicators or symptoms, is a powerful tool for monitoring health or well-being. We conducted a scoping review to provide an up-to-date, global overview of syndromic surveillance for animal health, focusing on variation between animal sectors (livestock, companion, and wildlife), geography, indi...
These guidelines are intended for all people who do fieldwork with bats in the field anywhere in the world. They update our previous IUCN Bat Specialist Group guidelines, which were developed specifically to address bat-related fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. These guidelines address "ordinary" circumstances and aim to minimize the risk of...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a significant threat to public health. Plasmids are principal vectors of AMR genes, significantly contributing to their spread and mobility across hosts. Nevertheless, little is known about the dynamics of plasmid genetic exchange across animal hosts. Here, we use theory and methodology from network and disease eco...
Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, such variation far exceeds what might be produced by sampling error alone. One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. A growing array of studi...
Sub-Saharan Africa is under-represented in global biodiversity datasets, particularly regarding the impact of land use on species’ population abundances. Drawing on recent advances in expert elicitation to ensure data consistency, 200 experts were convened using a modified-Delphi process to estimate ‘intactness scores’: the remaining proportion of...
A report of the Eklipse Expert Working Group on biodiversity and pandemics.
Building on existing relevant work on research agendas and knowledge gap analysis, identifying interdisciplinary research and action priorities, that contribute to a strategic research agenda on biodiversity and pandemics addressing the critical interlinkages between relev...
Although variation in effect sizes and predicted values among studies of similar phenomena is inevitable, such variation far exceeds what might be produced by sampling error alone. One possible explanation for variation among results is differences among researchers in the decisions they make regarding statistical analyses. A growing array of studi...
Cities can host significant biological diversity. Yet, urbanisation leads to the loss of habitats, species, and functional groups. Understanding how multiple taxa respond to urbanisation globally is essential to promote and conserve biodiversity in cities. Using a dataset encompassing six terrestrial faunal taxa (amphibians, bats, bees, birds, cara...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major threat to public health. Plasmids are principal vectors of antimicrobial resistance genes, greatly contributing to their spread and mobility across hosts. Nevertheless little is known about the dynamics of plasmid genetic exchange across animal hosts. The cow rumen ecosystem is an excellent model system bec...
Having a central scientific language remains crucial for advancing and globally sharing science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language also creates barriers to accessing scientific careers and knowledge. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we describe how, when, and why to make scientific literature more readily available in multiple l...
Having a central scientific language remains crucial for the advancement and global sharing of science. Nevertheless, maintaining one dominant language also creates barriers to accessing scientific careers and knowledge. From an interdisciplinary perspective, we describe how, when, and why to more readily make scientific literature available in mul...
Social and spatial network analysis is an important approach for investigating infectious disease transmission, especially for pathogens transmitted directly between individuals or via environmental reservoirs. Given the diversity of ways to construct networks, however, it remains unclear how well networks constructed from different data types effe...
We investigated the prevalence of coronaviruses in 44 bats from four families in northeastern Eswatini using high-throughput sequencing of fecal samples. We found evidence of coronaviruses in 18% of the bats. We recovered full or near-full-length genomes from two bat species: Chaerephon pumilus and Afronycteris nana , as well as additional coronavi...
Agricultural intensification is a threat to terrestrial ecosystems around the world. Agricultural areas, especially monocultures, create homogenous landscapes for wildlife. However, certain crops, such as sugarcane, are harvested in phases, creating a mosaic of fields in different stages of growth. We investigated changes in avian communities acros...
National species checklists are important for a variety of reasons, including biodiversity conservation. However, these national checklists are rarely complete, and it is not easy to gauge how many species have been overlooked or what the taxonomic identities of overlooked species would be. This is particularly the case for small, elusive, or noctu...
Cattle production is important to both communal livelihoods and the national economy of South Africa. Understanding the foraging ecology of cattle is important for managing both the animals and their rangelands. This paper reports the dietary preferences of Nguni cattle under holistic management and Brahman cattle under conventional management at t...
Quantifying the effectiveness of large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 is critical to adapting responses against future waves of the pandemic. Most studies of NPIs thus far have relied on epidemiological data. Here, we report the impact of NPIs on the evolution of SARS-CoV-2, taking the perspective of the virus. We ex...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat. A better understanding of how antibiotic use and between-ward patient transfers (or connectivity) impact population-level AMR in hospital networks can help optimize antibiotic stewardship and infection control strategies. Here, we used a metapopulation framework to explain variations in the inciden...
Quantifying the effectiveness of large-scale non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19 is critical to adapting responses against future waves of the pandemic. By combining phylogenetic data of 5,198 SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the chronology of non-pharmaceutical interventions in 57 countries, we examine how interventions and combinations there...
The phylogenetic relationships and species limits within the chiropteran family Miniopteridae are poorly known in mainland Africa. Recent systematic studies in Madagascar have shown that this is a species-rich family, yet only eight species are currently recognized or hypothesized for continental Africa. Based on partial cytochrome b sequences and...
Some of the world’s deadliest diseases and greatest public health challenges are zoonoses from wildlife, such as Ebola (Ebolavirus). Due to the increasing number of cases in recent years, it has been widely hypothesized that increasing human population densities and anthropogenic disturbance largely explain outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in human...
Tropical savannas are biomes of global importance under severe pressure from anthropogenic change, including land-cover and land-use change. Bats, the second-most diverse group of mammals, are critical to ecosystem functioning, but vulnerable to such anthropogenic stresses. There is little information on how savanna bats respond to land cover and l...
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global threat. A better understanding of how antibiotic use and between-ward patient transfers (or connectivity) impact hospital AMR can help optimize antibiotic stewardship and infection control strategies. Here, we used metapopulation ecology to explain variations in infection incidences of 17 ESKAPE pathogen v...
Tropical savannas are biomes of global importance that are under severe pressure from anthropogenic change, including land-cover and land-use change. Bats, the second-most diverse group of mammals, are critical to ecosystem functioning, but may be vulnerable to such anthropogenic stresses. However, there is little information on the response of sav...
Grazing by large mammals alters vegetation physiognomy, consequently changing habitat suitability for small mammal communities. We investigated the response of terrestrial small mammals to grazing by wild and domesticated ungulates at the boundary of a protected area (Telperion Nature Reserve) and surrounding cattle ranches in Mpumalanga, South Afr...
Mountains provide important habitats for many species and often have high levels of biodiversity and endemism. Habitat associations of terrestrial small mammals were investigated at Wakefield Farm at the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa from July 2015 to January 2016. Sherman live traps were used to capture small mammals on 35 g...
Bats are a critical component of most terrestrial systems, yet accurately assessing species richness and abundances remains a challenge. The use of acoustic monitoring has increasingly been used to assess bat communities. Compared with more traditional trapping surveys, acoustic monitoring is relatively easy to use and vastly increases the amount o...
The Brazilian Atlantic Forest is a severely threatened biodiversity hotspot and many remnants exist only as fragments. In order to understand how bat assemblage structure within a forest fragment surrounded by an urban matrix might respond to seasonality and different habitats , we sampled bats over 39 nights in the forest fragment of Gericinó-Mend...
Located in southwestern Brazil, the Pantanal is a Wetland of International Importance and Biosphere reserve. It is composed of several subregions, each with distinct vegetation, and hosts diverse bat fauna. The goal of this study was to compare the bat communities between different subregions of the Pantanal, especially poorly sampled areas. From F...
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/summary/67363010/0
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/85646524/0
http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/81081036/0
Leishmaniasis is a “neglected tropical disease” and serious public health issue in Brazil. While dogs are recognized as particularly important reservoirs, recent reports of domestic cats infected with Leishmania sp. in urban areas suggest their participation in the epidemiological chain of the parasite in endemic areas. The aim of this study was to...
Species of the genus Raymondia (Diptera: Streblidae) are obligate ectoparasites of bats. They have a wide distribution across Africa and are associated with many different bat species. Here we present the first record of this family in Swaziland. The ectoparasites were of the species Raymondia alulata and were found parasitizing individuals of the...
Bat distributions are still comparatively poorly known in Africa and updated national species lists do not exist for many countries. We present a revised checklist of the bats of Swaziland, which includes seven species not previously listed. Of these, two species are recent additions (Mops midas and Myotis bocagii) and these records marginally exte...
Fungal pathogens have become a serious threat to wildlife, threatening populations of even once common , abundant species. We describe the mycobiota associated with the nasal hairs of three Molossid bat species, Cynomops planirostris, Molossus molossus, and Molossus rufus, in southwest Brazil. Bats were captured in the Cerrado and Pantanal biomes....
Secondary succession in former arable fields (i.e. old fields) might be altered by the colonization of invasive alien species, with possible community-wide impacts, hindering the ability old fields to become species-rich communities. However, the effects of invasive species on local communities have rarely been addressed in the light of secondary s...
available at www.biotaxa.org/cl) forest. We also calculated the evenness and dominance of each site and compared similarity in overall biodiversity and diversity within feeding guilds between sites. These data contribute to our knowledge of the bat community in the mosaic landscape of urban, agricultural and cerrado patches of Mato Grosso do Sul an...
This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attachedcopy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial researchand education use, including for instruction at the authors institutionand sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling orlicensing copies, or posting to personal, insti...
Several factors, such as hunting and the pet trade, are responsible for the worldwide decline of wildlife populations. In addition, fatal collisions with vehicles on highways have also taken one of the largest tolls. This study aimed to quantify the richness and abundance of vertebrate roadkill along highway MS-080 in Mato Grosso do Sul, Central-We...
Leishmaniasis, a zoonotic disease caused by parasites of the genus Leishmania, has expanded beyond its natural range and is becoming increasingly urban. Using PCR and PCR-RFLP, we detected Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis in two bats (Chiroptera) in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, an endemic area. This is the first record of L. (V.) braziliensis in ba...
In this paper we present observations of individuals of the bee species Trigona recursa feeding on the fruits of Crotalaria micans. This plant, which contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, is known to be toxic to humans, mammals and poultry. Over the course of three days, we observed a large number of bees feeding on many individual Crotalaria micans pl...
Caves are unique habitats and important components of their ecosystems. Caves are also vital to local economies because they serve as tourist attractions. Cave habitats appear to host diverse communities of fungi. In this study we explore associations between levels of human disturbance and the diversity of fungi in four caves in Kentucky and Tenne...