Historically, the no‐man's land created by human warfare often protected wildlife and habitats by limiting human incursions and human population densities within disputed territories. Relatively few examples of this phenomenon have been identified in conjunction with recent and ongoing wars in developing countries, however. Modern wars and civil strife are typically associated with detrimental effects on wildlife and wildlife habitats. Most cited instances of contemporary war‐zone refuges refer to military security areas that are functionally and geographically distinct from actual battlefields or areas subject to armed civil conflicts. The disappearance of the war‐zone refuge effect is attributable to modern trends in the scale, intensity, or technologies associated with military conflicts and violent civil strife. Munitions and chemical agents exert both immediate and residual effects, direct and indirect, on wildlife and habitats. Overharvesting of wildlife and vegetation in conflict zones exacerbates existing constraints on the access to natural resources, threatening both the resource base and the livelihoods of local communities dependent on these resources. Socioeconomic studies have identified causative linkages between environmental degradation and violent civil strife, with the scarcity of natural resources fostering the emergence of war and civil conflicts in developing countries. Wars and civil strife create positive feedback that reinforces and amplifies interactions between and among ecosystem vulnerability, resource availability, and violent conflict. Strong and flexible partnerships between local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and international institutions may be a critical factor in mitigating the effects of war on wildlife by helping to maintain continuity in conservation efforts during periods of political instability.

Classic approaches to modeling biological invasions predict a "traveling wave" of constant velocity determined by the invading organism's reproductive capacity, generation time, and dispersal ability. Traveling wave models may not apply, however, for organisms that exhibit long-distance dispersal. Here we use simple empirical relationships for accelerating waves, based on inverse power law dispersal, and apply them to diseases caused by pathogens that are wind dispersed or vectored by birds: the within-season spread of a plant disease at spatial scales of <100 m in experimental plots, historical plant disease epidemics at the continental scale, the unexpectedly rapid spread of West Nile virus across North America, and the transcontinental spread of avian influenza strain H5N1 in Eurasia and Africa. In all cases, the position of the epidemic front advanced exponentially with time, and epidemic velocity increased linearly with distance; regression slopes varied over a relatively narrow range among data sets. Estimates of the inverse power law exponent for dispersal that would be required to attain the rates of disease spread observed in the field also varied relatively little (1.74-2.36), despite more than a fivefold range of spatial scale among the data sets.

African bush elephants inhabiting the undeveloped Kalahari Sands region of Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe are subject to episodic mortality during droughts.We monitored the drought-related mortality of elephants in Hwange National Park over the course of an extended drought between 1993 and 1995. The drought-related mortality of elephants was higher during 1994 than 1995, despite signi¢cantly higher rainfall in 1994 than 1995. We found signi¢cant di¡erences in the age-speci¢c mortality of elephants during 1994 and 1995. The cumulative mortality pro¢le from this study di¡ered signi¢cantly from previous die-o¡s at this site, with a higher mortalityamong adult age classes than that reported from earlier studies in Hwange National Park. The e¡ective duration of the rainy season, not total annual precipitation, appears to be the best predictor for the potential severity of drought mortality among elephants in the Kalahari Sands habitats of Hwange National Park.

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We analyzed age-/sex-specific morbidity and mortality data from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in China and Republic of Korea (ROK). Data from China exhibit a Gaussian distribution with peak morbidity in the 50–59-year cohort, while the ROK data have a bimodal distribution with the highest morbidity in the 20–29-year cohort.

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The observed patterns and variations in the ecology, epidemiology, distribution and prevalence of the West Nile Virus (WNV) in different areas of the Western Hemisphere make this pathogen of particular importance as a model for understanding the potential risk factors associated with emerging pathogens worldwide, particularly those involving zoonotic pathogens whose epidemiology involves the potential for vertical transmission in arthropod vector species, and horizontal and vertical transmission within and among vertebrate host species. Record numbers of human WNV cases were recorded in Canada during 2007, with >50% more cases than documented in any previous year. Although overall numbers of human infections recorded in the United States were not exceptionally high during 2007 relative to epidemic levels reported in 2002 and 2003, the state of Oklahoma reported that the highest-ever number of human WNV cases and the numbers of human cases recorded in Canada were 50% higher than previous record levels recorded in 2003. The record and near-record numbers of human WNV infections recorded in several regions of North America during 2007 have important implications for the future management and surveillance of WNV vectors and reservoirs in North America. The spatiotemporal distribution of WNV infections in humans and animals recorded during 2007 in North America and South America have important implications for the surveillance and management of public health threats from WNV in the Western Hemisphere. Serological surveys conducted in areas of intense WNV transmission in the United States have reported low prevalence of antibodies to WNV in human s populations, indicating that additional epidemic outbreaks of human disease from WNV can be expected in the future.

Climate change is expected to increase the prevalence of acute and chronic diseases among human and animal populations within the Arctic and subarctic latitudes of North America. Warmer temperatures are expected to increase disease risks from food-borne pathogens, water-borne diseases, and vector-borne zoonoses in human and animal populations of Arctic landscapes. Existing high levels of mercury and persistent organic pollutant chemicals circulating within terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in Arctic latitudes are a major concern for the reproductive health of humans and other mammals, and climate warming will accelerate the mobilization and biological amplification of toxic environmental contaminants. The adverse health impacts of Arctic warming will be especially important for wildlife populations and indigenous peoples dependent upon subsistence food resources from wild plants and animals. Additional research is needed to identify and monitor changes in the prevalence of zoonotic pathogens in humans, domestic dogs, and wildlife species of critical subsistence, cultural, and economic importance to Arctic peoples. The long-term effects of climate warming in the Arctic cannot be adequately predicted or mitigated without a comprehensive understanding of the interactive and synergistic effects between environmental contaminants and pathogens in the health of wildlife and human communities in Arctic ecosystems. The complexity and magnitude of the documented impacts of climate change on Arctic ecosystems, and the intimacy of connections between their human and wildlife communities, makes this region an appropriate area for development of One Health approaches to identify and mitigate the effects of climate warming at the community, ecosystem, and landscape scales.