BuggedBugs: How land use and climate variability impact on hosts and their parasite communities

• Applicants: Dr. Catharine Ruth Archer; Professorin Dr. Lena Wilfert
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Animals and Ecosystems, Organismic Interactions ; Evolution, Anthropology ; Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569058676

The overarching aim of BuggedBugs is to unravel how interactions between land use intensity and climatic variation affect parasite biodiversity, directly and indirectly via effects on hosts. Parasitism is the most common consumer strategy on earth. Parasites, including anything from viruses to parasitoids, are major components of ecosystems that shape host community composition, biotic interactions and trophic cascades, and thus ultimately affect ecosystem services. As a result, parasites play an essential role in ensuring a healthy and functioning ecological community. However, hidden within the host, parasites have been largely overlooked in ecological research. In order to understand how perturbations such as climate change and land use (i.e. mowing, grazing and fertilization in grassland ecosystems) and their interactions affect parasite communities, we need to understand how these stressors affect them directly and indirectly via their hosts and the wider environment. Here, we use the unique data and samples collected by the Biodiversity Exploratories from 2008 to 2025 to understand how host-parasite communities are affected by land use and climatic variation over the short and long term. This treasure trove of data allows us to explore the temporal dynamics of these effects by looking into the past and then use these data to predict the future of host-parasite interactions in managed grasslands. We will use the true bugs, i.e. the Heteroptera, as a model taxon. This highly ecologically diverse insect group is of great importance in grassland ecosystems, as herbivores, prey, predators and vectors of plant pathogens. In Objective 1, we use molecular approaches and fieldwork to identify the full parasite community of the true bugs along a land use gradient. In Objective 2, we will use Heteropteran samples collected, stored and ID’d since 2008 from all plots to determine how the composition, abundance and functional traits of hosts have been shaped by variation in land use and climate, building a mechanistic understanding of how these stressors influence communities. In Objective 3, we look to the future, and examine signals of adaptation and plasticity to disturbance from land management and climate change in the true bugs. After developing this detailed and robust understanding of parasite diversity and the ecological drivers of host community dynamics, we link these puzzle pieces in Objective 4. We ask how land use intensity and climate affect host community composition, abundance and health, and in turn the biodiversity and composition of their parasites. Collectively, this will offer essential insights into the mechanisms underpinning these responses and their consequences, such as the risk of disease emergence. BuggedBugs therefore sheds light on how an ecologically important but hidden component of biodiversity is affected by land use, climate change and interactions between them.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1374: Biodiversity Exploratories