Going Wild in Forest Park:The Movement of Wildlife and Disease in an Urban Food Web

Forest Park – which lies at the heart of Saint Louis and attracts some 13 million people annually – is home to a rich and diverse suite of animals. Using state-of-the-art bio-logging techniques, such as GPS collars, this project aims to explore the movement of diversity of species through space and time in an urban food web. Most movement studies focus on single species or groups of related species, but ecological communities are composed of functionally and phylogenetically diverse species, whose ecology is tied to other community members. Thus, an enormous opportunity exists to use biologging to explore the role of movement in driving patterns of biodiversity. We plan to attach biologgers to 12 species, including birds (Great-horned owl, Barred owl, Green heron, Bald eagle), fish (Brown bullhead, Largemouth bass), mammals (Mink, Ground-hog, White-tailed deer, Eastern gray squirrel, Red Fox) and reptiles (Box turtle, Snapping turtles). We will also quantify baseline health parameters and infectious and non-infectious disease prevalence for the species we track, linking animal movement with disease dynamics in an urban setting. This is a key goal of our project, with emerging infectious diseases at the human/non-human animal interface gaining importance for public health globally, best illustrated by the current COVID 19 pandemic.

Research Team

Anthony Dell, National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, WashU
Stephen Blake, Saint Louis University
Stan Braude, WashU, University of Missouri – Saint Louis
Sharon Deem, Saint Louis Zoo
Amy Witt, Forest Park Forever
Jason Knouft, Saint Louis University, National Great Rivers Research and Education Center