Please join us for a seminar talk by Dr. Lauren Ponisio of the University of Oregon.

Host traits, microbes, and disease in intensively managed agricultural landscapes

Abstract

The microbiome and pathobiome are increasingly recognized as key determinants of how wildlife responds to global change and habitat loss, but it is unknown why microbial associations vary between and within species, and how the environment shapes these associations. We examine if host traits shape microbial associations and whether recourses pulses in the form of mass-blooming crops shape the pathobiome. We analyze the microbiomes and parasites of 1,686 wild bees and managed honey bees across 34 species that vary widely in phenotypic traits. We found that bees with more distinct traits host more distinct pathobiomes.  In addition, host aggregation on mass-blooming crops lead to disease amplification,  but only in sites with a low abundance of flowering habitat on field margins. For the microbiome, realized diet breadth was a stronger predictor of microbial distinctness and diversity than trait distinctness or the fundamental, species-level diet breadth. We also found that microbiome and pathobiome community composition were correlated and that microbiome composition was further shaped by the community composition of the pollen collected by individual bees. Our findings demonstrate that both species-level and individual-level variation in host traits act as filters affecting the assembly of microbes in free-living organisms. In addition, our results highlight the importance of non-crop habitat for supporting bee communities and suggest that monoculture alone cannot support healthy bees.

Bio

‍Lauren's research focuses on wild bee conservation, including restoring bee communities and bee health in agriculture, and the effects of fire on bee communities. The aim of her research is to discover new insights into how communities form, evolve, and persist through time and space, aiding in the prediction and prevention of community collapse. Lauren did her graduate work with Claire Kremen at the University of California Berkeley and was a Moore-Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.  She was an assistant professor at UC Riverside from 2017-2020, when she began a position at the University of Oregon at the Institute for Ecological and Evolution and the Data Science Initiative.

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