To prevent pandemics, it is essential to focus efforts on understanding pathogen dynamics at their source, their associated wild hosts, and the drivers of their spillover and emergence. Human alterations of landscapes and resultant effects on human and animal distributions are key environmental changes occurring worldwide. It is increasingly evident that such anthropogenic environmental changes are driving increased emergence of zoonotic pathogens. The current understanding of these linkages is still limited, primarily correlative, and not consistent across spatial and temporal scales, pathogens, transmission routes, and ecological contexts.

There is an urgent need for a mechanistic understanding of pathogen spillover across different contexts to support evidence-based decision-making in environmental planning and land transformation to reduce future pandemic risk. This requires robust scientific studies that focus on wildlife during the transition period between land-use types, while also capturing how different land-use types influence human-nature interactions.

The SIMPEL project is applying innovative inter- and trans-disciplinary studies to characterize the ecological and social impacts of transitions from one land-use type to another, including effects on wild and domestic hosts (i.e., diversity, distribution [including density], contacts), their pathogens, and on human-nature relations in highly biodiverse and rapidly changing landscapes of the Andes-Amazon-Orinoco in Colombia and Bolivia. Latin America is a predicted and known hotspot of pathogen emergence but is under-represented in research efforts to characterize spillover risks in wildlife.

We expect that social-ecological edge effects resulting from the transition between natural forest and deforested areas and juxtaposition to Indigenous Peoples, peasant farmers, and settlers living in the areas across the research sites will change wildlife abundance, distribution and physiology, pathogen prevalence, and risk of animal-to-human spillover. We deliberately focus on the ecological effects as the upstream drivers of pathogen emergence because it is fundamental to our understanding of this complex system and a neglected area of study upon which future research can build. We will define the links between potential pathogen emergence and environmental transformation, and strengthen the evidence base for integrating health into environmental conservation and development policies to better predict and prevent future pandemic emergence associated with land-use change.