Life, death, and disease—in C

I drew this to illustrate Forum paper for the scientific journal Oikos. Here is a summary of the study, “Dead or alive: carbon as currency to integrate disease and ecosystem ecology theory” (by Seabloom et al.):

Disease and ecosystem ecology are treated as separate disciplines, but we know they're intertwined—so how can we study them together? Think in terms of carbon, suggests this Forum paper. Most studies of disease stop tracking organisms after they die, ignoring their ongoing role in the ecosystem. By shifting to units of carbon rather than individuals, we can keep track of dead hosts as well as living ones (not to mention partially infected hosts that shed dead tissue).

The authors present four models focusing on plant and phytoplankton pathogens to explore this coupling of disease and ecosystem perspectives. They show that disease spread is mediated by the decomposition rates of dead hosts, while pathogens influence carbon cycling between live and dead biomass. Their modeling also predicts that disease is more devastating to ecosystems with fast carbon turnover, like lakes and oceans, relative to slow-turnover ecosystems like boreal forests—just a few examples of insights gained by unifying the two fields of study.