BAM! POW! Why macroecology works and how it can be useful to disease ecology

A 5-minute "Ignite" talk given at the Ecological Society of America conference in 2018, in the Frontiers and Limits in Disease Macroecology session.Macroecologists have long sought to explain and predict patterns of biodiversity. The field’s scope has increased from predicting species richness to abundances and metabolic distributions. In attempting to unite these patterns, modern forms of macroecology embrace the complex nature of information underlying these patterns, and work by characterizing the information entropy of the system. I highlight why this is an important advance for ecology, and how it relates to system specific mechanisms. I talk about how the methods of statistical aggregation used information entropy-based macroecology can be applied to disease ecology, where networks of interactions come into play.