A Collaborative Multiple Stressor Approach for Identifying Spatial Heterogeneities in Wildlife Health and Conservation Priorities

Wildlife face a number of extrinsic stressors, such as habitat loss, pathogen infections, and contaminant exposure, which can increase the energy needed to maintain optimal health and survival. These multiple extrinsic stressors can also occur simultaneously during intrinsically stressful life stages such as reproduction, migration, or hibernation. To fully understand how to support healthy wildlife populations, we must quantify physiological and immunological phenotypes across a variety of stressors. We pose a framework for conducting field studies to collect individual-level samples that can be used for measuring physiological and immunological phenotypes as well as the potentially stressful intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of those phenotypes. We suggest that collaborative efforts should then be made to create broader, spatially coordinated hypotheses for determining patterns of wildlife health under intrinsically stressful time periods and across extrinsically stressful landscapes. We provide an example and preliminary findings for this multi-stressor, collaborative, and spatially coordinated approach with an ongoing study of North American bat health. Quantifying direct and critical measures of wildlife health and identifying key intrinsic and extrinsic stressors that drive physiological and immunological phenotypes will provide broad targets for conservation strategies and where and when those strategies should be prioritized in the future.