Data from: Cascading effects of a disease outbreak in a remote protected area
- Monk, Julia
- Smith, Justine
- Donadio, Emiliano
- Perrig, Paula
- Crego, Ramiro
- Fileni, Martin
- Bidder, Owen
- Lambertucci, Sergio
- Pauli, Jonathan
- Schmitz, Oswald
- Middleton, Arthur
DOIAbstract
Disease outbreaks induced by humans increasingly threaten wildlife communities worldwide. Like predators, pathogens can be key top-down forces in ecosystems, initiating trophic cascades that may alter food webs. An outbreak of mange in a remote Andean protected area caused a dramatic population decline in a mammalian herbivore (the vicuña), creating conditions to test the cascading effects of disease on the ecological community. By comparing a suite of ecological measurements to pre-disease baseline records, we demonstrate that mange restructured tightly-linked trophic interactions previously driven by a mammalian predator (the puma). Following the mange outbreak, scavenger (Andean condor) occurrence in the ecosystem declined sharply and pl...
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