system service. It is estimated that 60 to 80 percent of the world’s 250,000 flowering plants depend on animals—mostly insects—for pollination (Kremen et al. 2007). Eighty-seven of the world’s 124 most commonly cultivated crops are animal pollinated, and insectpollinated forage plants such as alfalfa and clover provide feed for livestock. Roughly thirtyfive percent of global crop production is ...

The land management practices of pastoralist Maasai communities have a major bearing on landscapes and wildlife habitats in northern Tanzania and play a key role in maintaining habitat for one of the world's most spectacular assemblages of terrestrial large mammals. Pastoralists manage lands according to locally devised rules designed to manage and conserve key resources such as pastures and wa...

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been detected in the microbiota of many wildlife species, including long-distance migrants. Inadequately treated wastes from humans and livestock dosed with antimicrobial drugs are often assumed to be the main sources of AMR to wildlife. While wildlife populations closely associated with human populations are more likely to harbour clinically important AMR rel...

BACKGROUND Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a fatal arthropod-borne zoonotic disease of livestock and humans. Since the identification of RVF in Kenya in the 1930s, repeated epizootics and epidemics coinciding with El Niño events have occurred in several locations in Africa and Saudi Arabia, causing mass deaths of livestock and humans. RVF is of great interest worldwide because of its negative effect...

This paper reviews the importance of African lakes and their management challenges. African inland lakes contribute significantly to food security, livelihoods and national economies through direct exploitation of fisheries, water resources for irrigation and hydropower generation. Because of these key contributions, the ecosystem services provided are under significant stress mainly owing to h...

Recurrent spillover of Brucella abortus from wildlife reservoirs to domestic cattle in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) has prevented the United States from completely eradicating bovine brucellosis. Risks to cattle are a function of the size and location of wildlife and livestock populations, the degree and nature of spatio-temporal interactions between the various hosts, the level of diseas...

A better understanding of the links between biodiversity, health and disease presents major opportunities for policy development, and can enhance our understanding of how health-focused measures affect biodiversity, and conservation measures affect health. The breadth and complexity of these relationships, and the socio-economic drivers by which they are influenced, in the context of rapidly sh...

This study was part of a larger cross-sectional survey that was evaluating tuberculosis (TB) infection in humans, livestock and wildlife in the Serengeti ecosystem in Tanzania. The study aimed at evaluating the genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from TB patients attending health facilities in the Serengeti ecosystem. DNA was extracted from 214 sputum cultures obtained from...

The ecology and distribution of Bacillus anthracis is poorly understood despite continued anthrax outbreaks in wildlife and livestock throughout the United States. Little work is available to define the potential environments that may lead to prolonged spore survival and subsequent outbreaks. This study used the genetic algorithm for rule-set prediction modeling system to model the ecological n...

Over the last century, changes in land-use, modification of agriculture-livestock production systems, disruption of wildlife habitats, increase of human activities, higher frequency of international and intercontinental travels, wider circulation of animals and animal products have contributed to alter the distribution, presence and density of hosts and vectors. As a result, the number of emerg...