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Anthropogenic land consolidation intensifies zoonotic host diversity loss and disease transmission in human habitats

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 9, pages 99–110 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Anthropogenic land-use change is an important driver of global biodiversity loss and threatens public health through biological interactions. Understanding these landscape–ecological effects at local scales will help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by balancing urbanization, biodiversity and the spread of infectious diseases. Here, we address this knowledge gap by analysing a 43-year-long monthly dataset (1980–2022) of synanthropic rodents in Central China during intensive land-use change. We observed a notable increase in the mean patch size, coinciding with a substantial change in rodent community composition and a marked decline in rodent diversity; eight of the nine local rodent species experienced near-extirpation. Our analysis reveals that these irregular species replacements can be attributed to the effect of land consolidation on species competition among rodents, favouring striped field mice, a critical reservoir host of Hantaan virus (HTNV). Consequently, land consolidation has facilitated the proliferation of striped field mice and increased the prevalence of HTNV among them. This study highlights the importance of considering both direct and indirect effects of anthropogenic activities in the management of biodiversity and public health.

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Fig. 1: Observed dynamics of rodent diversity, community composition and HTNV prevalence among striped field mice, 1980–2022, the Hu region, China.
Fig. 2: Detecting interspecific causality in rodent population dynamics.
Fig. 3: Associations between land consolidation and rodent population dynamics.
Fig. 4: Model simulations of the three-species dynamic model compared to empirical observations and parameter estimates from the three-species dynamic model.
Fig. 5: Results of the nonlinear transmission model of HTNV among striped field mice.

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Data availability

All data are available in the main text or the Supplementary Information. Raw data are not publicly available and are protected due to confidentiality agreements, which were used under license for the current study but are available upon reasonable request to the corresponding author and with permission from the data provider (H.T.). The request will be responded to within 2 weeks.

Code availability

Code files are available via GitHub at https://github.com/huaiyutian/Hantaan-virus.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the hundreds of CDC staff and local health workers in Shaanxi province who collected successive data from 1980 to 2022. We are also deeply grateful to P. Zheng for her valuable contributions to this paper. This study was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2233300001); National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFC2303803); scientific and technological innovation 2030—major project of new generation artificial intelligence (2021ZD0111201); National Natural Science Foundation of China (82073616, 82204160); research on Key Technologies of Plague Prevention and Control in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (2021ZD0006); BNU-FGS Global Environmental Change Program (no. 2023-GC-ZYTS-11); and key research projects of Beijing Natural Science Foundation-Haidian District Joint Fund (L232014). J.R., O.G.P. and C.F. were funded by NSF/BBSRC project ‘Integrating metaviromics with epidemiological dynamics: understanding virus transmission in the Anthropocene’ (BB/Y006879/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, the decision to publish, or in preparation of the paper.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Shan Pei, Pengbo Yu, Jayna Raghwani.

  2. These authors jointly supervised this work: Ruifu Yang, Oliver G. Pybus, Andrew P. Dobson, Nils Chr. Stenseth, Huaiyu Tian.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, Center for Global Change and Public Health, Beijing Research Center for Respiratory Infectious Diseases, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Shan Pei, Ziyan Liu, Yidan Li, Yanchao Cheng, Qiushi Lin, Yunyu Tian, Yiting Xu, Yilin Liang & Huaiyu Tian

  2. School of National Safety and Emergency Management, National Key Laboratory of Intelligent Tracking and Forecasting for Infectious Diseases, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, China

    Shan Pei & Yuxin Wang

  3. Shaanxi Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Xi’an, China

    Pengbo Yu, Jianhui Qu, Jing Wei, Shen Li & Tongjun Zhang

  4. Department of Pathobiology and Population Science, The Royal Veterinary College, London, UK

    Jayna Raghwani & Oliver G. Pybus

  5. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Chuliang Song & Andrew P. Dobson

  6. Division of Sciences, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, Sri City, India

    Guha Dharmarajan

  7. School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Christina L. Faust

  8. Shaanxi Blood Center/Xi’an Blood Center, Xi’an, China

    Chaofeng Ma

  9. Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Department of Biology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Nita Bharti

  10. Institut de Biologie de l’École Normale Supérieure UMR 8197, Eco-Evolutionary Mathematics, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

    Bernard Cazelles

  11. Unité Mixte Internationnale 209, Mathematical and Computational Modeling of Complex Systems, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

    Bernard Cazelles

  12. State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Beijing, China

    Ruifu Yang

  13. Department of Biology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Oliver G. Pybus

  14. Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Nils Chr. Stenseth

  15. Centre for Pandemics and One-Health Research, Sustainable Health Unit (SUSTAINIT), Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Nils Chr. Stenseth

  16. Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Nils Chr. Stenseth

Authors
  1. Shan Pei
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  2. Pengbo Yu
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Contributions

H.T. conceived the study. H.T., O.G.P., A.P.D. and N.C.S. jointly supervised this work. P.Y., T.Z., J.Q. and J.W. collected the statistical data. S.P., Y.W., Y. Liang and Y.C. conducted the analyses. P.Y., J.R., Z.L., Q.L., C.S., G.D., C.L.F., J.Q., J.W., S.L., T.Z., C.M., N.B., B.C., R.Y., O.G.P., A.P.D., Y.X., Y. Li and N.C.S. edited the paper. H.T., S.P., Y.C., Y. Li, Y.W., Y.T. and J.R. wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Pengbo Yu, Nils Chr. Stenseth or Huaiyu Tian.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Greg Adler, Jinbao Liao and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Pei, S., Yu, P., Raghwani, J. et al. Anthropogenic land consolidation intensifies zoonotic host diversity loss and disease transmission in human habitats. Nat Ecol Evol 9, 99–110 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02570-x

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