Data Proliferation, Reconciliation, and Synthesis in Viral Ecology

Abstract The fields of viral ecology and evolution are rapidly expanding, motivated in part by concerns around emerging zoonoses. One consequence is the proliferation host–virus association data, which underpin macroecology zoonotic risk prediction but remain fragmented across numerous data portals. In present article, we propose that synthesis a central challenge to characterize global virome develop foundational theory ecology. To illustrate this, build an open database mammal associations reconciles four published sets. We show this offers substantially richer view known than any individual source set also databases such as these becoming out date discovery accelerates. argue for shift practice toward development, incremental updating, use synthetic sets ecology, improve replicability facilitate work predict structure dynamics virome.