HPAI virus transmission is shaped by inter-specific social network structure

The emergence of zoonotic and epizootic disease from communities of wild animals is a recurrent threat to human and animal health, to food and economic security. This is particularly true for disease systems that involve many interacting species, where the varied ecological and behavioural diversity of those species interact, driving complex pathways of transmission, and where sampling many species across time and space is difficult. As a consequence, surveillance of disease across communities of wild animals is largely reliant on responsive, rather than preventative, sampling after an outbreak event. Here, we inferred social networks of wild birds using five years of bird survey data from a county in Northern England. We mapped 8,162 links between 159 species, and combined this with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza virus (HPAIV) genomic similarity measures from 35 host species, measured over 388 sequences. Inter-specific social network position predicted similarity between viral genomes, consistent with HPAIV transmission between species that co-occur in the wild. Our results have important applications for surveillance and prioritization of zoonotic and epizootic disease, and provide an empirical basis for future theoretical and species trait-based evaluation of pathogen spread among ecological communities.