
Konstans WellsSwansea University | SWAN · Department of Biosciences
Konstans Wells
PhD
About
166
Publications
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Introduction
I am an ecologist and modeller, focusing on the consequences of environmental change on biodiversity, wildlife, invasive species and host-parasite interactions. My interests include questions of how insights from demographic and epidemiological dynamics, species range dynamics and bio-geographic patterns can be used to identify key processes for optimizing conservation and pest control efforts and the prevention of disease spread under different environmental scenarios and policy schemes.
Additional affiliations
June 2015 - August 2017
February 2002 - February 2006
October 2013 - May 2015
Publications
Publications (166)
Changes in species distributions open novel parasite transmission routes at the human–wildlife interface, yet the strength of biotic and biogeographical factors that prevent or facilitate parasite host shifting are not well understood. We investigated global patterns of helminth parasite (Nematoda, Cestoda, Trematoda) sharing between mammalian wild...
Emerging infectious diseases arising from pathogen spillover from mammals to humans comprise a substantial health threat. Tracing virus origin and predicting the most likely host species for future spillover events are major objectives in One Health disciplines. However, the species that share pathogens most widely with other mammals, and the role...
Emerging infectious diseases increasingly threaten wildlife populations. Most studies focus on managing short‐term epidemic properties, such as controlling early outbreaks. Predicting long‐term endemic characteristics with limited retrospective data is more challenging. We used individual‐based modeling informed by individual variation in pathogen...
Host specificity encompasses the range and diversity of host species that a parasite is capable of infecting and is considered a crucial measure of a parasite’s potential to shift hosts and trigger disease emergence. Yet empirical studies rarely consider that regional observations only reflect a parasite’s ‘realized’ host range under particular con...
Vulnerability to habitat fragmentation
Habitat fragmentation caused by human activities has consequences for the distribution and movement of organisms. Betts et al. present a global analysis of how exposure to habitat fragmentation affects the composition of ecological communities (see the Perspective by Hargreaves). In a dataset consisting of 448...
The simultaneous infection of organisms with two or more co-occurring pathogens, otherwise known as co-infections, concomitant infections or multiple infections, plays a significant role in the dynamics and consequences of infectious diseases in both humans and animals. To understand co-infections, ecologists and epidemiologists rely on models capa...
Understanding biotic interactions is a crucial goal in community ecology and species distribution modelling, and large strides have been made towards improving multivariate computational methods with the aim of quantifying biotic interactions and improving predictions of species occurrence. Yet, while considerable attention has been given to comput...
Aim: Changing biodiversity and environmental conditions may allow multi-host pathogens to spread among host species and affect prevalence. There are several widely acknowledged theories about mechanisms that may influence variation in pathogen prevalence, including the controversially debated dilution effect and abundance-occupancy relationship hyp...
Introduction
In production forests, management can have cascading effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Acoustic diversity reflects the diversity of vocalizing animals and has also considerable recreational value for human well-being, but the relationship between acoustic diversity and forest management remains largely unexplored
Method...
Recent losses in the abundance and diversity of arthropods have been documented in many regions and ecosystems. In grasslands, such insect declines are largely attributed to land use, including modern machinery and mowing regimes. However, the effects of different mowing techniques on arthropods remain poorly understood. Using 11 years of data from...
In modified production landscapes, biodiversity faces unprecedented pressures from human actions, resulting in significant species declines of plant and animal taxa, including birds. Understanding the underlying mechanisms responsible for such declines is essential to counteract further loss and support practitioners in conserving biodiversity and...
Background: The geographic distribution and host-parasite interaction networks of Sarcocystis spp. in small mammals in eastern Asia remain incompletely known.
Methods: Experimental infections, morphological and molecular characterizations were used for discrimination of a new Sarcocystis species isolated from colubrid snakes and small mammals colle...
Mosquitoes have innate preferences for their blood-meal hosts, but these can be modified by the environment, with implications for disease spread under climate and land use change. To predict the spread of vector-borne pathogens more accurately we need to better understand blood-meal plasticity under changing environmental conditions. We compiled b...
Restoring and conserving habitat and the species they shelter has become a primary focus to mitigate the current extinction crisis. Setting aside land designated as protected areas (PAs) is an efficient way of achieving these aims. This strategy has been proven to enhance different aspects of species richness and abundance across ecosystems1-4. How...
Aim: Despite the strong evidence of species range shifts as a response to environmental change, attempts to identify species traits that modulate those shifts have been equivocal. We investigate the role of species traits and environmental preferences on birds' range shifts in Great Britain, an island where dispersal is limited by the English Chann...
Dietary variation within and across species drives the eco-evolutionary responsiveness of genes necessary to metabolize nutrients and other components. Recent evidence from humans and other mammals suggests that sugar-rich diets of floral nectar and ripe fruit have favoured mutations in, and functional preservation of, the ADH7 gene, which encodes...
The impact of local biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning is well established, but the role of larger-scale biodiversity dynamics in the delivery of ecosystem services remains poorly understood. Here we address this gap using a comprehensive dataset describing the supply of 16 cultural, regulating and provisioning ecosystem services in 150 Eur...
Generalised additive models (GAMs) are increasingly popular tools for estimating smooth nonlinear relationships between predictors and response variables. GAMs are particularly relevant in ecology for representing hierarchical functions for discrete responses that encompass complex features including zero inflation, truncation and uneven sampling....
Global change in the Anthropocene has modified the environment of almost any species on earth, be it through climate change, habitat modifications, pollution, human intervention in the form of mass drug administration (MDA), or vaccination. This can have far-reaching consequences on all organisational levels of life, including eco-physiological str...
Generalised Additive Models (GAMs) are increasingly popular for describing smooth nonlinear relationships between predictors and response variables. GAMs are particularly relevant in ecology for representing hierarchical functions for discrete responses that encompass complex features including zero-inflation, bounding and uneven sampling. However,...
Context
Current diversity and species composition of ecological communities can often not exclusively be explained by present land use and landscape structure. Historical land use may have considerably influenced ecosystems and their properties for decades and centuries.
Objectives
We analysed the effects of present and historical landscape struct...
Metapopulation structure plays a fundamental role in the persistence of wildlife populations. It can also drive the spread of infectious diseases and transmissible cancers such as the Tas-manian devil facial tumour disease (DFTD). While disrupting this structure can reduce disease spread, it can also impair host resilience by disrupting gene flow a...
The Covid-19 pandemic is of zoonotic origin, and many other emerging infections of humans have their origin in an animal host population. We review the challenges involved in modelling the dynamics of wildlife-human interfaces governing infectious disease emergence and spread. We argue that we need a better understanding of the dynamic nature of su...
Metapopulation structure (i.e. the spatial arrangement of local populations and corridors between them) plays a fundamental role in the persistence of wildlife populations, but can also drive the spread of infectious diseases. While the disruption of metapopulation connectivity can reduce disease spread, it can also impair host resilience by disrup...
The emergence of infectious agents with pandemic potential present scientific challenges from detection to data interpretation to understanding determinants of risk and forecasts. Mathematical models could play an essential role in how we prepare for future emergent pathogens. Here, we describe core directions for expansion of the existing tools an...
Aim: Macroecological analyses provide valuable insights into factors that influence how parasites are distributed across space and among hosts. Amid large uncertainties that arise when generalizing from local and regional findings, hierarchical approaches applied to global datasets are required to determine whether drivers of parasite infection pat...
Co-infection, coinfection, and concomitant infections are all terms used to describe the occurrence of more than one simultaneous infection in individual hosts, populations, or communities. With a growing number of pathogens being discovered and emerging from shifting between different host species, it is perhaps little surprise that co-infection a...
Outbreaks of infectious viruses resulting from spillover events from bats have brought much attention to bat-borne zoonoses, which has motivated increased ecological and epidemiological studies on bat populations. Field sampling methods often collect pooled samples of bat excreta from plastic sheets placed under-roosts. However, positive bias is in...
Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, understanding how different components of land use drive biodiversity loss requires the investigation of multiple trophic levels across spatial scales. Using data from 150 agricultural grasslands in central Europe, we assess the influence of multiple components of local-and l...
Controlling the regional re-emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) after its initial spread in ever-changing personal contact networks and disease landscapes is a challenging task. In a landscape context, contact opportunities within and between populations are changing rapidly as lockdown measures are relaxed and...
Controlling the regional re-emergence of SARS-CoV-2 after its initial spread in ever-changing personal contact networks and disease landscapes is a challenging task. In a landscape context, contact opportunities within and between populations are changing rapidly as lockdown measures are relaxed and a number of social activities re-activated. Using...
Sarcocystis scandentiborneensis sp. nov. was discovered in histological sections of striated musculature of treeshrews (Tupaia minor, T. tana) from Northern Borneo. Sarcocysts were cigar-shaped, 102 μm–545 μm long, and on average 53 μm in diameter. The striated cyst wall varied in thickness (2–10 μm), depending on whether the finger-like, villous p...
The rapid and pandemic spread of COVID-19 has led to unprecedented containment policies in response to overloaded health care systems. Disease mitigation strategies require informed decision-making to ensure a balance between the protection of the vulnerable from disease and the maintenance of global economies. We show that temporally restricted co...
The whipworm Trichuris muris is known to be associated with various rodent species in the northern hemisphere, but the species identity of whipworm infecting rodents in the Oriental region remains largely unknown. We collected Trichuris of Muridae rodents in mainland and insular Southeast Asia between 2008 and 2015 and used molecular and morphologi...
The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a notorious economic and environmental pest species in its invasive range. To better understand the population and range dynamics of this species, 41 yr of abundance data have been collected from 116 unique sites across a broad range of climatic and environmental conditions in Australia. We analyzed th...
Emerging infectious diseases arising from pathogen spillover from mammals to humans constitute a substantial health threat. Tracing virus origin and predicting the most likely host species for future spillover events are major objectives in One Health disciplines.
We assessed patterns of virus sharing among a large diversity of mammals, including h...
The 150 grassland plots were located in three study regions in Germany, 50 in each region. The dataset describes the yearly grassland management for each grassland plot using 116 variables.
General information includes plot identifier, study region and survey year. Additionally, grassland plot characteristics describe the presence and starting year...
Within host-parasite communities, viral co-circulation and co-infections of hosts are the norm, yet studies of significant emerging zoonoses tend to focus on a single parasite species within the host. Using a multiplexed paramyxovirus bead-based PCR on urine samples from Australian flying foxes, we show that multi-viral shedding from flying fox pop...
With ongoing introductions into Australia since the 1700s, the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) has become one of the most widely distributed and abundant vertebrate pests, adversely impacting Australia's biodiversity and agroeconomy. To understand the population and range dynamics of the species and its impacts better, occurrence and abunda...
Treeshrews are small, squirrel-like mammals in the order Scandentia, which is nested together with Primates and Dermoptera in the superordinal group Euarchonta. They are often described as living fossils, and researchers have long turned to treeshrews as a model or ecological analogue for ancestral primates. A comparative study of colour vision-enc...
Aim: The European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a notorious economic and environmental pest species in its invasive range. To better understand the population and range dynamics of this species, long-term abundance data has been collected across a broad range of climatic and environmental condition in Australia. We analysed this time series dat...
The development of methods to detect how a species’ occurrence probability covaries with the occurrences of other species (e.g. co-occurrence) is a booming and somewhat divisive area of statistical ecology. Many authors (including, sadly, myself) have jumped the gun when interpreting co-occurrence patterns by grandiosely stating that they reflect '...
Parasites with low host specificity (e.g. infecting a large diversity of host species) are of special interest in disease ecology, as they are likely more capable of circumventing ecological or evolutionary barriers to infect new hosts than are specialist parasites. Yet for many parasites, host specificity is not fixed and can vary in response to e...
Introduction: Rodent species are well-known reservoirs for pathogens,
some of which have zoonotic potential. The health status of rodent
populations in tropical forests, however, is neglected and it is
often unclear how forest degradation results in an increased infection
of native wildlife with pathogens also found in invasive species. In this
res...
Host specificity has a major influence on a parasite's ability to shift between human and animal host species. Yet there is a dearth of quantitative approaches to explore variation in host specificity across biogeographical scales, particularly in response to the varying community compositions of potential hosts. We built a global dataset of interm...
Notable outbreaks of infectious viruses resulting from spillover events from bats have brought much attention to the ecological origins of bat-borne zoonoses, resulting in an increase in ecological and epidemiological studies on bat populations in Africa, Asia, and Australia. The aim of many of these studies is to identify new viral agents with fie...
1. European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) have been exposed to rabbit haemorrhagic
disease virus (RHDV) and myxoma virus (MYXV) in their native and invasive
ranges for decades. Yet, the long-term effects of these viruses on rabbit population
dynamics remain poorly understood.
2. In this context, we analysed 17 years of detailed capture–mark–recap...
Inferring interactions between co‐occurring species is key to identify processes governing community assembly. Incorporating interspecific interactions in predictive models is common in ecology, yet most methods do not adequately account for indirect interactions (where an interaction between two species is masked by their shared interactions with...
Aim
The genetics of organisms currently isolated in refugia has received little attention compared to post‐glacial expansions. We study the population history and connectivity of a rat endemic to montane habitat in Borneo to better understand the history and potential of populations in interglacial mountain refugia.
Location
Sabah, Borneo, Malaysi...
[Background] Spillover of parasites at the domestic animal - wildlife interface is a pervasive threat to animal health. Cat and dog fleas (Ctenocephalides felis and C. canis) are among the world’s most invasive and economically important ectoparasites. Although both species are presumed to infest a diversity of host species across the globe, knowle...
Aim
Identifying barriers that govern parasite community assembly and parasite invasion risk is critical to understand how shifting host ranges impact disease emergence. We studied regional variation in the phylogenetic compositions of bird species and their blood parasites ( Plasmodium and Haemoproteus spp.) to identify barriers that shape parasite...