This book focuses on central themes related to the conservation of bats. It details their response to land-use change and management practices, intensified urbanization and roost disturbance and loss. Increasing interactions between humans and bats as a result of hunting, disease relationships, occupation of human dwellings, and conflict over fruit crops are explored in depth. Finally, contributors highlight the roles that taxonomy, conservation networks and conservation psychology have to play in conserving this imperilled but vital taxon. With over 1300 species, bats are the second largest order of mammals, yet as the Anthropocene dawns, bat populations around the world are in decline. Greater understanding of the anthropogenic drivers of this decline and exploration of possible mitigation measures are urgently needed if we are to retain global bat diversity in the coming decades. This book brings together teams of international experts to provide a global review of current understanding and recommend directions for future research and mitigation.

Capacity development is one of the pillars through which the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations supports member countries. This manual serves as a resource for better understanding the ecology of bats, their natural history, their role in providing ecosystem services, techniques used for monitoring populations, and for the detection, identification and monitoring of viruses naturally circulating in bats and that can have significant implication if they are transmitted to people either through direct contact, or indirectly, through livestock. This manual will engage professionals from multiple disciplines ranging from public health and veterinary medicine to natural resource managers and biologists, but most importantly, highlights the need to understand the anthropogenic drivers resulting in disease transmission from bats to people.

The book will cover the most important zoonoses with a public health impact and debate actual developments in this field from a One Health perspective. The outline of the book follows a “setting” approach, i.e. special settings of zoonoses with a public health aspect, rather than presenting a simple textbook of an encyclopedic character. Main chapters will deal with zoonoses in the food chain including a special focus on the emerging issue of antibiotic resistance, with zoonoses in domestic and pet animals, in wildlife animal species (including bats as an important infectious agent multiplier), influenza and tuberculosis as most prominent zoonoses, and zoonotic pathogens as bioterroristic agents. Special interest chapters debate non-resolved and currently hotly debated zoonoses (e.g. M. Crohn/paratuberculosis, chronic botulism) as well as the economic and ecological aspects of zoonoses.

Approximately 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonoses, and the rate of emergence of zoonotic diseases is on the rise. Bats are being increasingly recognised as an important reservoir of zoonotic viruses of different families, including SARS coronavirus, Nipah virus, Hendra virus and Ebola virus. Understanding bats’ role in emerging zoonotic diseases is crucial to this rapidly expanding area of research. Bats and Viruses: A New Frontier of Emerging Infectious Diseases provides an updated overview of research focusing on bat biology and the role bats play as hosts of many major zoonotic viruses. The text covers bat biology, immunology, and genomics. Chapters also delve into the various major bat-borne virus families, including lyssaviruses, paramyxoviruses, coronaviruses, filoviruses and reoviruses, among others. Edited by leaders in the field, Bats and Viruses: A New Frontier of Emerging Infectious Diseases is a timely, invaluable reference for bat researchers studying microbiology, virology and immunology, as well as infectious disease workers and epidemiologists, among others.

One of the biggest threats today is the uncertainty surrounding the emergence of a novel pathogen or the re-emergence of a known infectious disease that might result in disease outbreaks with great losses of human life and immense global economic consequences. Over the past six decades, most of the emerging infectious disease events in humans have been caused by zoonotic pathogens-those infectious agents that are transmitted from animals to humans. In June 2008, the Institute of Medicine's and National Research Council's Committee on Achieving Sustainable Global Capacity for Surveillance and Response to Emerging Diseases of Zoonotic Origin convened a workshop. This workshop addressed the reasons for the transmission of zoonotic disease and explored the current global capacity for zoonotic disease surveillance.

Zoonotic diseases represent one of the leading causes of illness and death from infectious disease. Defined by the World Health Organization, zoonoses are "those diseases and infections that are naturally transmitted between vertebrate animals and man with or without an arthropod intermediate." Worldwide, zoonotic diseases have a negative impact on commerce, travel, and economies. In most developing countries, zoonotic diseases are among those diseases that contribute significantly to an already overly burdened public health system. In industrialized nations, zoonotic diseases are of particular concern for at-risk groups such as the elderly, children, childbearing women, and immunocompromised individuals. The Emergence of Zoonotic Diseases: Understanding the Impact on Animal and Human Health, covers a range of topics, which include: an evaluation of the relative importance of zoonotic diseases against the overall backdrop of emerging infections; research findings related to the current state of our understanding of zoonotic diseases; surveillance and response strategies to detect, prevent, and mitigate the impact of zoonotic diseases on human health; and information about ongoing programs and actions being taken to identify the most important needs in this vital area.

H1N1 ("swine flu"), SARS, mad cow disease, and HIV/AIDS are a few examples of zoonotic diseases-diseases transmitted between humans and animals. Zoonotic diseases are a growing concern given multiple factors: their often novel and unpredictable nature, their ability to emerge anywhere and spread rapidly around the globe, and their major economic toll on several disparate industries. Infectious disease surveillance systems are used to detect this threat to human and animal health. By systematically collecting data on the occurrence of infectious diseases in humans and animals, investigators can track the spread of disease and provide an early warning to human and animal health officials, nationally and internationally, for follow-up and response. Unfortunately, and for many reasons, current disease surveillance has been ineffective or untimely in alerting officials to emerging zoonotic diseases. Sustaining Global Surveillance and Response to Emerging Zoonotic Diseases assesses some of the disease surveillance systems around the world, and recommends ways to improve early detection and response. The book presents solutions for improved coordination between human and animal health sectors, and among governments and international organizations. Parties seeking to improve the detection and response to zoonotic diseases-including U.S. government and international health policy makers, researchers, epidemiologists, human health clinicians, and veterinarians-can use this book to help curtail the threat zoonotic diseases pose to economies, societies, and health.

This book gathers contributions by 16 international authors on the phenomenon “bats,” shedding some light on their morphology, the feeding behaviors (insects, fruits, blood) of different groups, their potential and confirmed transmissions of agents of diseases, their endo- and ectoparasites, as well as countless myths surrounding their lifestyle (e.g. vampirism, chupacabras, batman etc.). Bats have been known in different cultures for several thousand centuries, however their nocturnal activities have made them mysterious and led to many legends and myths, while proven facts remained scarce. Even today, our knowledge of bats remains limited compared to other groups in the animal kingdom. Also, their famous ability to avoid collisions with obstacles during their nightly flights with the help of a sophisticated and unique system using ultrasound waves (which are transmitted and received) is as poorly studied as birds finding their way from continent to continent. In recent times, where globalization transports millions of people and goods from one end of the earth to the other, there are increased risks posed by agents of diseases, as a result of which bats have received increasing attention as potential vectors. These suppositions are based on their proven transmission of viruses such as rabies. In dedicated chapters, the book addresses the following topics: • The world of bats • The astonishing morphology of bats • Bats as potential reservoir hosts for vector-borne diseases • Bat endoparasites • Macroparasites – ectoparasites • Glimpses into how bats fly • Blood-licking bats • Vampirism in medicine and culture • Chupacabras and “goat milkers” • Myths on candiru As such, this book provides a broad range of information for all non-experts interested in biological topics, but also for people working in this field, as well as physicians and veterinarians who are confronted with clinical cases, and for teachers and students interested in expanding their knowledge of biology and of past and present cultures.

Every three years a major international conference on bats draws the leading workers in the field to a carefully orchestrated presentation of the research and advances and current state of understanding of bat biology. Bats are the second most populous group of mammalia species, after rodents, and they are probably the most intensively studied group of mammals. Virtually all mammologists and a large proportion of organismic biologists are interested in bats. The earlier two edited books deriving from previous bat research conferences, as well as this one, have been rigorously edited by Tom Kunz and others, with all chapters subjected to peer review. The resulting volumes, published first by Academic Press and most recently by Smithsonian, have sold widely as the definitive synthetic treatments of current scientific understanding of bats.

Networks have permeated everyday life through everyday realities like the Internet, social networks, and viral marketing. As such, network analysis is an important growth area in the quantitative sciences, with roots in social network analysis going back to the 1930s and graph theory going back centuries. Measurement and analysis are integral components of network research. As a result, statistical methods play a critical role in network analysis. This book is the first of its kind in network research. It can be used as a stand-alone resource in which multiple R packages are used to illustrate how to conduct a wide range of network analyses, from basic manipulation and visualization, to summary and characterization, to modeling of network data. The central package is igraph, which provides extensive capabilities for studying network graphs in R. This text builds on Eric D. Kolaczyk’s book Statistical Analysis of Network Data (Springer, 2009).