One Health: Linking It All Together

by Simone Scully

r. Luz A. de Wit had somewhat of an unconventional journey to bat conservation work. First, she went to veterinary school, then studied conservation medicine before eventually getting her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology. Then, for many years, she studied invasive cats and their role in the spread of disease. Today, she’s one of the newest researchers at Bat Conservation International (BCI)—and she’s helping bring One Health approaches to bat conservation.

The One Health initiative is a framework for understanding the ecological, environmental, and socio-economic processes that occur when you look at the overlap between animal health, human health, and environmental health. That’s why it’s typically depicted as a Venn diagram, and where the three circles intersect is “One Health.”

It’s also a tool for helping inform our conservation decisions. When you understand the processes impacting all three of these areas, you can start looking for solutions that benefit all three, too.

All living things, including humans, depend on healthy ecosystems. When ecosystems are healthy, they provide us with what we refer to as ecosystem services, which include things like water purification, climate regulation, food, etc. Bats also provide ecosystem services, like pest predation for agriculture, pollination, and seed dispersal in tropical forests.

When we help protect bats’ ecosystems, by protecting their roosting and foraging habitats, we also allow bats to provide these ecosystem services that we need for agriculture and our own well-being. When we help their health, we also improve the ecosystem and benefit our own health—it’s a nicely knitted system.

We’re looking at the potential risks of bats getting exposed to viruses from people. We’re also trying to understand the distribution of other viruses within North America.

This can benefit conservation by understanding what may be driving risks of bats getting viruses. But we can also help land managers, wildlife managers, biologists, and land-use planners. For example, if bats are living closer to humans and domestic animals, or in areas that are deforested and degraded, they might have a higher prevalence of viruses in these populations. This information could inform environmental management.

Yes. Before this, I was working more in academic settings, and my work at BCI is the first time I feel like I’m actually doing something that directly aligns with both my professional and ethical goals. I feel like I’m directly able to help us achieve conservation goals.

Growing up in Mexico City, everybody was generally scared of bats—and that’s the same in many cultures, too. But they’re not scary from a biological and ecosystem perspective—in fact, they’re very important. I wish that more people knew that because I think they would appreciate bats so much more.