SPECIAL ISSUE – BATS Ecology of Zoonotic Infectious Diseases in Bats: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

• Bats are hosts to a range of pathogens, some of which are known to infect and cause disease in humans and domestic animals. Human activities that increase exposure to bats will likely increase the opportunity for these infections to spill over from bats to humans in the future. • Understanding the impacts of anthropogenic changes on infection dynamics within bat populations is necessary to predict and prevent human infections of bat origin. However, this initially requires understanding both bat populations and the dynamics of infections within them. • We propose that a combination of field and laboratory studies are needed to create data-driven mathematical models to elucidate aspects of bat ecology that are most critical to the dynamics of emerging bat viruses. Keywords: Epidemiology; zoonoses; mathematical modeling; Nipah virus; public health; rabies; filovirus; coronavirus Correspondence