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                  <text>The research in this publication was partially or fully funded by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Heather Disney Dugan, Acting Director, Colorado Parks and Wildlife • Parks and Wildlife Commission: Carrie Besnette Hauser, Chair • Dallas May, ViceChair • Marie Haskett, Secretary • Taishya Adams • Karen Michelle Bailey • Betsy Blecha • Gabriel Otero • Duke Phillips, IV • Richard Reading • James Jay
Tutchton • Eden Vardy

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https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01548-2

OPEN

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Host relatedness and landscape connectivity shape
pathogen spread in the puma, a large secretive
carnivore
Nicholas M. Fountain-Jones 1,2 ✉, Simona Kraberger3, Roderick B. Gagne 3, Daryl R. Trumbo4,
Patricia E. Salerno4,5, W. Chris Funk 4, Kevin Crooks6, Roman Biek 7, Mathew Alldredge8, Ken Logan9,
Guy Baele10, Simon Dellicour 10,11, Holly B. Ernest12, Sue VandeWoude 3, Scott Carver 2 &amp;
Meggan E. Craft 1

Urban expansion can fundamentally alter wildlife movement and gene ﬂow, but how urbanization alters pathogen spread is poorly understood. Here, we combine high resolution host
and viral genomic data with landscape variables to examine the context of viral spread in
puma (Puma concolor) from two contrasting regions: one bounded by the wildland urban
interface (WUI) and one unbounded with minimal anthropogenic development (UB). We
found landscape variables and host gene ﬂow explained signiﬁcant amounts of variation of
feline immunodeﬁciency virus (FIV) spread in the WUI, but not in the unbounded region. The
most important predictors of viral spread also differed; host spatial proximity, host relatedness, and mountain ranges played a role in FIV spread in the WUI, whereas roads might have
facilitated viral spread in the unbounded region. Our research demonstrates how anthropogenic landscapes can alter pathogen spread, providing a more nuanced understanding of
host-pathogen relationships to inform disease ecology in free-ranging species.

1 Department of Veterinary Population Medicine, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN 55108, USA. 2 School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania,
Hobart, Australia 7001. 3 Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA. 4 Department of
Biology, Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA. 5 Universidad Regional Amazónica IKIAM, Km 7 vía
Muyuna, Tena, Ecuador. 6 Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA. 7 Institute of
Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK. 8 Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Fort Collins, CO 80526,
USA. 9 Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Montrose, CO 81401, USA. 10 Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Transplantation, Rega Institute, KU Leuven,
Herestraat 49, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. 11 Spatial Epidemiology Lab (SpELL), Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP160/12 50, av. FD Roosevelt, 1050
Bruxelles, Belgium. 12 Wildlife Genomics and Disease Ecology Lab, Department of Veterinary Sciences, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82070, USA.
✉email: Nick.FountainJones@utas.edu.au

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nderstanding how pathogens spread through populations
remains a fundamental challenge. The extent to which
pathogen spread reﬂects movement patterns of their hosts
is enigmatic but important for controlling disease1,2. If pathogen
spread mirrors host gene ﬂow, host genetic structure/differentiation could be a valuable proxy for pathogen spread and be
used as a basis to inform disease control3–7 (e.g., male vampire
bat [Desmodus rotundus] genetics closely mirrors phylogenetic
structure of rabies8). A close relationship between host gene ﬂow
and pathogen spread may also be evidence for increased transmission between related conspeciﬁcs, and could affect evolutionary pressures on the pathogen, as closely related hosts may be
more likely to have similar immune environments9. In contrast, if
host gene ﬂow and pathogen spread are decoupled, ﬁne-scale
patterns of host movement, for example, may best predict spread
and thus inform the strategy employed for disease control2,10,11.
The patterns of pathogen spread can also be inﬂuenced by
characteristics of the pathogen itself, where host-speciﬁc and
directly transmitted pathogens likely have the greatest concordance with host gene ﬂow, relative to multi-host and environmentally transmitted pathogens. Given this range of scenarios,
a better understanding of how host relatedness and environmental predictors drive these processes would improve our estimates of pathogen spread in heterogeneous landscapes.
Urbanization is one of the most destructive and large-scale of
all anthropogenic landscape fragmentation processes, but how
urbanization shapes pathogen spread in particular is still not well
understood12,13. As urban development fragments habitats and
introduces barriers (the wildland–urban interface, WUI), it can
cause reduced host gene ﬂow between populations10,14, altered
animal behaviour (for example, animals becoming more nocturnal to avoid humans15,16), and changes in feeding17 and movement18 patterns. If these anthropogenic impacts on host
behaviour affect transmission dynamics, they may manifest in the
demographics of pathogen populations19 (e.g., if transmission
events are happening rapidly, the pathogen’s effective population
size may be exponentially increasing19). Comparing the factors
that shape pathogen spread in populations that are affected by
urbanization is often difﬁcult due to a lack of high-resolution data
(i.e., coupled host and pathogen genomic data for most individuals) or comparable populations (i.e., well-sampled populations
impeded and unimpeded by urbanization). Quantifying how
urbanization can affect host gene ﬂow, and how this in turn
impacts the transmission dynamics and spread of pathogens, can
help address this important research gap.
Here, we determine how landscape variables (including those
associated with urbanization) and host relatedness affect pathogen spread and transmission in puma (Puma concolor). Puma are
useful indicators of the effects of urbanization on wildlife as they
are sensitive to urban development17,20 but can persist in areas
impacted by urbanization provided sufﬁcient landscape connectivity (e.g., ref. 21). As puma foraging, movement, and other
behaviours are altered by urban development17,22,23, this species
offers a valuable case study for how pathogen spread can be
effected by urbanization—subject matter that is increasingly
important for wildlife conservation and management24,25. We
utilize data we collected from 217 pumas sampled from two
geographically distinct regions (~500 km apart): one region
bounded by the wildland–urban interface (hereafter the WUI)
and the other in a more wild and rural setting relatively
unbounded by anthropogenic development (hereafter UB). Our
previous work found limited gene ﬂow between pumas from these
two regions but similar levels of genetic diversity26. From individuals in both regions, we collated high-resolution host genomic
and spatial data alongside puma feline immunodeﬁciency virus
(FIVpco) sampled from the same individuals. FIVpco is a rapidly
2

evolving retrovirus27 endemic to puma populations, and is
thought to be predominantly transmitted horizontally via
aggressive encounters28, although vertical transmission has been
documented by phylogenetic analyses29. Because FIVpco is
essentially apathogenic in puma30,31, it is an ideal model pathogen to understand transmission dynamics in wild systems without potential confounding effects of disease on behaviour and
demography29,32. We examine what factors impact FIVpco spread
using a novel pipeline synthesizing phylodynamic, phylogeographic and landscape genetic techniques (an ecophylogenetic
approach33). We employ this pipeline to test for (1) differences in
FIVpco demographic histories and transmission dynamics across
regions, (2) concordant patterns of host relatedness, viral phylogenetics and spatial distance, and (3) the relative roles of host
relatedness and landscape predictors, such as urban development,
in shaping the pattern of spread of the virus. We hypothesized
that as anthropogenic factors impact puma movement (e.g.,
ref. 34) and gene ﬂow26 at the WUI, that transmission opportunities would be restricted and spatial proximity and host relatedness would be more important in shaping spread in this region.
Results
Of the 217 individuals we tested, we found that FIVpco prevalence
was higher in the WUI than UB puma (58% vs 41%, p = 0.04
(two-sample test for equality of proportions), see Table S1 for site
and population characteristics). We sequenced FIVpco from a
total of 46 animals representing most of the infected animals in
both populations over a 10-year period. For 43 of the pumas, we
obtained both FIVpco sequences (the conserved pol, ORFA and
env genes representing 36% of the FIV genome) and the corresponding puma genomic data (consisting of a dataset of 12,444
neutral single nucleotide polymorphisms [SNPs] per
individual26).
Region-speciﬁc viral demographic histories. We found not only
distinct demographic histories in the viruses circulating in the
WUI and UB regions, but also differing FIVpco subtypes. Bayesian
time-scaled phylogenetic analysis of the FIVpco sequences
revealed two co-circulating FIVpco subtypes: FIVpco CO, circulating among pumas in both regions (Fig. 1a) and FIVpco WY,
which was only detected in the UB after having been previously
detected in puma in Wyoming (Fig. 1b; see Fig. S1 for a
maximum-likelihood tree that illustrates the broader phylogenetic
context of these two subtypes across North America). Within
FIVpco CO, we identiﬁed three clades (I, II and III, Fig. 1a) that
had contrasting and landscape-speciﬁc demographic histories
(Fig. S2). Clade I had been circulating predominantly in the WUI
since ~1995 (95% high posterior density interval (HPD):
1984–2003), and the effective population size of this clade has
been gradually increasing through time (Fig. S2). Clade II showed
a similar trajectory in population size (Fig. S2) and was found in
puma from both regions, which is potentially indicative of longdistance dispersal of FIVpco (Fig. 1a). Clade III, in contrast, predominantly circulated in the UB, but had a much more distinctive
demographic pattern (Fig. S2). We estimated that Clade III began
circulating in the WUI in 2001 (95% HPD: 1992–2006) and
arrived in the UB in 2006 (95% HPD: 2003–2008), afterwards
going through a period of population growth which plateaued
around 2012 (Fig. S3). In contrast, we found that FIVpco WY has
likely circulated at low prevalence in the UB for over a hundred
years (Fig. S3) and had a slower estimated evolutionary rate than
FIVpco CO (Table S2).
Divergent patterns of viral and host relatedness across regions.
Overall, despite regional ﬁdelity, the FIVpco phylogeny did not

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Fig. 1 Tanglegram revealing how FIVpco phylogenetic relationships overall mapped imprecisely onto the puma relatedness cladogram in our study
regions. a Bayesian time-scaled phylogenetic tree for FIVpco subtype CO found in both the wildland–urban interface (WUI) and unbounded (UB) regions.
b Bayesian time-scaled phylogenetic tree for FIVpco subtype WY which was only found in the UB. I–III represent the different clades identiﬁed using tree
structure analysis69. Virus branch colours are based on population assignment posterior values from our FIVpco subtype CO discrete trait analysis. c Host
relatedness cladogram constructed using singular value decomposition (SVD) quartets37 based on over 12,000 SNPs from 130 individual puma across both
study areas. The grey shaded box encompasses related individuals with phylogenetically similar FIVpco isolates. Virus symbols (from panels a and b) are
coloured based on viral lineage membership. This colour matches the puma infected with that isolate (puma silhouettes c) and the lines connecting each
isolate to each host in the tanglegram. Tips without virus symbols indicate that there was no matching host genomic data for this FIVpco isolate. Branch
colours indicate which region each individual puma and matching virus was sampled from (WUI or UB).

map closely onto the puma relatedness cladogram; yet there was
some localized evidence for concordance between the two in the
WUI region (grey boxes, Fig. 1a–c). For example, four related
individuals in the WUI were infected with phylogenetically
similar FIVpco (dark grey box, Fig. 1a–c) and were also captured
in close spatial proximity to each other (dashed circle, Fig. 2d). In
contrast, there was limited evidence of similar patterns in the UB
as the most phylogenetically similar FIVpco isolates were sampled
across unrelated individuals. In the UB, a signiﬁcantly higher
proportion of individuals in each ‘neighbourhood’ (i.e., pumas
likely to have home-range overlap) were qPCR negative for
FIVpco than puma in the WUI (Mann–Whitney U Test, p =
0.007, Fig. S4). In addition, in both regions, there was qualitative
evidence for spatial structuring with some FIVpco lineages being
locally dominant (e.g., CO clade I and III in Fig. 2). However,
overall FIVpco spread was a complex mixture of local and longer‐
distance jumps across both landscapes with uninfected individuals captured at the same time and within 500 m of infected
individuals in both regions (Fig. 2). Similarly, individuals captured within months of each other at the same location were
commonly infected with phylogenetically distinct FIVpco subtypes
or clades (Fig. 2).

Predictors of FIV spread are region-dependent. We employed
generalized dissimilarity models35 (GDM) and maximum
likelihood of population-effects36 (MLPE) to test how host and
landscape shaped two components (the overall phylogeographic
pattern and lineage dispersal velocity) of spread in each region.
Landscape variables for both techniques were formulated using
a resistance/conductance approach37. We calibrated our resistance/conductance costs based on expert opinion as well as
optimizing the landscape variables using host genetic distance
using the Resistance GA routine35. In the UB, our optimization
approach revealed that none of the landscape variables
(Table S3) explained host gene ﬂow more than the null model
(i.e. models were &gt;2 AICc units higher than the null or the
model with no landscape variables included, Table S4). Subsequently, no host-genetic optimized surfaces were included in
the UB model (see ‘Methods’). In contrast, our optimisation
approach identiﬁed a stronger impact of spatial proximity on
host gene ﬂow in the WUI (Table S5). Canopy cover and urban
land cover univariate models were also within 2 AICc units of
the spatial proximity model, thus we combined these variables
together to generate a multivariate, host genetics optimised
resistance surface (hereafter called host-optimized resistance

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Fig. 2 Spatially projected FIV phylogenies showing the conﬁguration of FIVpco spread in the unbounded (UB) and wildland–urban interface (WUI)
regions. Panels a–d represent enlarged sections of each area. Tree tips represent the capture locations. Lines indicate FIVpco estimated branch locations,
with colours of each line as well as the coloured puma symbols reﬂecting FIVpco subtype or lineage membership based on tree structure analysis69. The
dashed circle indicates the group of individuals in the WUI in which the viral phylogeny mapped onto the host cladogram (grey boxes in Fig. 1). Grey
shading shows the extent of the Denver metropolitan areas. Branches coming from outside the study area in the top panels are the branches connecting
each region. See Supplementary Data 1–4 for .kml ﬁles to recreate this map. FIVpco or host genomic data could not be tested in some individuals (white
boxes).

surface). The host-optimized resistance surface was strongly
correlated with interpolated host genetic resistance (Mantel
ρ = 0.76, p = 0.001). We thus present models in the WUI region
with host genetic resistance and host-optimised resistance
included separately. In both regions, to tease apart the effect of
host genetics and landscape on FIV spread, we also included the
non-host genetics optimized landscape resistance/conductance
surfaces (hereafter called landscape variables) in our models as
well as spatial proximity and host variables.
Strikingly, landscape and host variables explained signiﬁcant
variation of FIVpco spread for the WUI only. In the WUI, our
GDM models explained 20% of total model deviance (p = 0.012)
but only 7% in the unbounded population (p = 0.23). Moreover,
the most important variables that shaped spread in each case were
different (Fig. 3a). To support these results, we compared our
non-linear GDM models to MLPE. One advantage of the GDM
method over MLPE and other methods is that it can capture nonlinear associations between response and predictor matrices.
However, model performance of MLPE has been more rigorously
evaluated compared to GDM on landscape genetic datasets38.
Here, we highlight factors that explain the most deviance in our
GDM models and are within two log units of the best performing
MLPE models using BIC (Tables S6 and S7). In the UB, FIVpco
spread was associated with roads (i.e., individuals more connected
by roads had similar FIV isolates, Fig. 3b, Table S6). In contrast,
the viral spread in the WUI was shaped by spatial proximity
coupled with host relatedness and impervious surface (Fig. 3a,
Table S7). As spatial proximity decreased, so did the FIVpco
patristic distance between individuals; neighbouring individuals
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shared more phylogenetically similar FIVpco isolates (Fig. 3c).
Similarly, as host relatedness decreased, so did FIVpco patristic
distance (i.e., related individuals were more likely to share
phylogenetically similar FIVpco isolates, Fig. 3e). A different
measure of individual genetic distance (the Smouse measure39)
did not alter our results. We found a similar positive relationship
between FIVpco patristic distance and impervious surface
resistance (Fig. 3e). Furthermore, in complement to our
relatedness measure, we also included host genetic resistance in
our GDM models (see ‘Methods’ for details). Individuals in the
WUI with low host genetic resistance values had more similar
phylogenetically FIVpco isolates (Fig. 3f). However, this relationship plateaued with dissimilarity values of over 0.05 and was not
signiﬁcant (p = 0.38).
We also found that there were region-speciﬁc impacts of
landscape on FIVpco lineage dispersal velocity. Our analysis
revealed that elevation tended to act as a conductance factor
increasing the dispersal velocity of FIVpco lineages in the WUI,
whereas none of the predictors we measured had any
substantial effect on lineage dispersal velocity in the UB
(positive Q distribution and associated Bayes factor support
&gt;340; see Fig. S6 and Table S7 for a list of tested landscape
factors). Furthermore, warmer minimum temperatures (as
measured in the coolest month) tended to act as a resistance
factor decreasing lineage dispersal velocity in the same region.
Taken together, these results indicate that in the WUI, FIVpco
tended to spread faster through colder, higher elevation areas
less suitable for puma habitat. In the WUI, the areas of higher
elevation tended to be away from the urban edge.

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Fig. 3 Results from the GDM analyses of FIVpco spread. a Heat map showing the deviance explained by each predictor in the unbounded (UB) and
wildland–urban interface (WUI) *p value 0.01–0.05. Predictor labels in grey boxes = spatiotemporal predictors, predictors in orange = host genetic
measures, predictors in red = associated with anthropogenic development, predictors in olive green = natural landscape features. The right panel shows
partial effect plots (all other variables held at the mean) of the GDM-ﬁtted I-splines showing the relationship between partial FIVpco patristic distance
for the variables selected in the UB ﬁnal model (b, see ‘Methods’) and WUI (c–f) in order of importance. Pat distance = patristic distance. Lines across the
x-axis represent a rug plot showing the distribution of the data and the grey surrounding the blue line (the ﬁt) indicates 95% conﬁdence intervals. rD:
Resistance distance. dps: Proportion of shared alleles. See Tables S6/S7 for corresponding MLPE results. See Fig. S5 for the model with host genetic
resistance is substituted for optimized host resistance.

Discussion
Our multifaceted approach linking landscape, host genomic, and
pathogen genomic data uncovered unique landscape-speciﬁc
relationships with FIVpco spread, indicative of altered epidemiological dynamics associated with urban landscape structure. We
found that spatial proximity was positively associated with FIVpco
spread, but only in the WUI (Wildland Urban Interface). In the
WUI, host relatedness, host-optimised resistance and impervious
surface also had a minor association with FIVpco spread. These
landscape factors mirrored the factors shaping host gene ﬂow in
the WUI26, providing support that host movement and viral
spread were more intimately related in the WUI than in the UB
(Unbounded) region. However, while there was some evidence
for concordance between the FIVpco phylogeny and host cladogram in the WUI, they did not map precisely onto each other in
either region (Fig. 1), indicating that transmission occurs outside
of related individuals. There was little evidence of FIVpco/host
concordance in the UB where host relatedness did not shape
phylogeography and entirely different sets of predictors shaped
host gene ﬂow (spatial proximity and tree cover26). These
opposing patterns between host gene ﬂow and viral spread could
reﬂect regional differences in transmission. One potential scenario is that transmission between neighbouring related conspeciﬁcs may be more likely in the WUI due to altered puma
movement, dispersal patterns22,23 and foraging behaviours17. The
urban development that impacts the WUI is linear (i.e., where the
Great Plains meet the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains). This
linear development restricts juvenile dispersal23 and could lead to
more opportunities for transmission among related conspeciﬁcs
(i.e., individuals establish home ranges close to their parents). Our
previous work supports this hypothesis as we demonstrated that
family units were more clustered in space, where puma genetic
distance per kilometre and sub-structure was greater in the WUI
compared to the UB26. There has not been an extensive evaluation of relatedness in neighbouring home-range females, but
female matrilines (groups of maternally-related females) are

known to occur41,42. Furthermore, we found evidence that
infection was more clustered in space in the WUI compared to
the unbounded one, supporting the idea that spatial proximity
increases transmission risk between related individuals in the
WUI. This shift in transmission risk may reduce evolutionary
pressure on the virus due to factors such as similarity in immune
proﬁle9.
Roads, common but mostly unpaved in this UB region, were a
modest predictor of spread in the UB. Radiotelemetry has shown
that puma often move using unpaved roads43 and rapid viral
evolution potentially allowed us to detect this modest effect.
There was a smaller impact of roads on host gene ﬂow26 which
supports the idea that FIV phylogenetics may capture more
contemporary movement patterns impossible to detect using host
genetics alone10,11,44. When host gene ﬂow and viral spread are
decoupled, as was the case in the UB, the rapid accumulation of
viral mutations may conversely obscure historical trends in
connectivity45. This could explain why we detected no effect of
tree cover on FIVpco spread even though puma are known to have
a preference for tree cover to disperse and hunt46,47. The altered
epidemiological history of the clade, dominant in the UB compared to all other detected clades, may reﬂect or be a consequence
of relatively unrestricted spread in the UB (Fig. S3, FIVpco CO
clade I). We postulate that recent arrival of FIVpco CO clade I in
the UB and signature of rapid expansion19 across the Uncompahgre Plateau (Fig. S2) may only have been possible in a region
where viral spread itself was unbounded. Further work is needed
to assess the temporal dynamics of FIVpco in the UB. The high
elevation Uncompahgre Plateau (averaging 2900 m a.s.l, Fig. 2)
did not shape viral spread, even though puma are known to have
a preference for not dispersing across cold, high altitude divides46.
In contrast, we found that higher altitude areas increased dispersal velocity in the WUI. As most human activity in the Front
Range (Fig. 2) occurs in lower altitude areas, it is plausible that
increased viral velocity in higher altitude areas is a product
of the host’s avoidance of the human ‘super predator’17,48.

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FIV transmission events have been shown to be more likely to
occur further from the urban edge in bobcat populations26 and
the same may apply for pumas in the WUI region here. Velocity
may also be faster through higher elevations in the Front Range as
puma are more likely to rapidly move through unsuitable habitat.
Unsuitable habitat has also been demonstrated to increase the
velocity of rabies lineages in dogs49. We acknowledge that in this
study we did not sample all pumas in the system nor between the
two sampled regions, and that FIVpco could not always be
sequenced. This could mean that we missed, for example, some
FIVpco lineages that could have altered our inference about FIVpco
patterns. Nonetheless, this did not compromise our ability to gain
complementary insights into the drivers of host connectivity by
combining high-resolution host and pathogen genomic data,
which would have been impossible to detect with either host or
pathogen data alone.
Our ﬁndings have pathogen and host management implications, as we demonstrated that spatial proximity and host relatedness may be relevant predictors of pathogen spread in regions
impacted by urban development. This may mean that the difﬁcult
task of disease control in a large apex predator (such as vaccinating against feline leukaemia virus in a puma population25)
may be more tractable in bounded populations. Because juveniles
set up home ranges near their parents, dispersal events important
for pathogen jumps in the landscape are more constrained.
Further, as host gene ﬂow and viral spread were tightly linked in
the WUI, targeting individuals where gene ﬂow was less constrained by impervious surface (further from the urban areas)
may also reduce spread. Our work provides a valuable case study
of how landscape context and host relatedness can be important
in disease management plans. As urban landscapes continue to
expand, improving our understanding of how heterogeneous
landscapes and host relatedness alter pathogen transmission will
be increasingly important.
Methods
Samples. Puma blood and tissue samples were collected from 103 individuals (48
males, 55 females) between 2005 and 2014 in the UB and 110 individuals (43 males,
54 females, 12 undetermined) between 2003 and 2015 from the WUI as part of
monitoring efforts by Colorado Parks and Wildlife in the Rocky Mountain Range
of Colorado, USA23,50. This sampling effort is likely to represent a large proportion
of the resident puma present in both regions during the sampling period23. See
Table S1 for further details on the samples.
FIV detection and sequencing. Total DNA was extracted from 50 µl whole blood
samples using the QIAGEN DNeasy Blood &amp; Tissue extraction kit (Qiagen, Inc.,
Valencia, CA) with an extended incubation period of two hours or from 200 µl
whole blood samples using a phenol–chloroform extraction as per Pietro et al.51.
Isolated DNA was quantiﬁed using a QuBit 2.0 ﬂuorometer (ThermoFisherScientiﬁc). DNA from individual puma were screened for the presence of
FIVpco provirus using a speciﬁc qPCR assay as described by Lee et al.52. Using these
data, we compared prevalence from both regions using a two-sample test for
equality of proportions.
Full ORFA and pol gene regions were isolated from those samples identiﬁed as
qPCR positive using a nested PCR protocol. See the Supplementary Note for the
sequencing protocol and Table S8 for primer details. While we also sequenced the
env gene, our assessment of the temporal signal (see next section) indicated many
discrepancies in the data regarding the use of a molecular clock (strict or relaxed)
to analyse these data. Resulting genetic sequences with chromatograms were
checked, assembled, trimmed and aligned using the MUSCLE algorithm53 using
Geneious 7.0.6. Our Pol and ORFA datasets (GenBank accession:
MN563193–MN563239) were compiled together with those sequences available in
the public database Genbank, previously isolated from across the USA54 (Fig. S1).
Recombination was detected using RDP software V455; parameters were set at
default with linear topology. Events were determined as true if supported by three
or more methods with p values &lt;10e−3 combined with phylogenetic support.
Recombination-free datasets were used for all downstream phylogenetic analyses.
Viral phylogenetics. To examine the broad placement of the FIVpco isolates
sampled during this study, a maximum-likelihood tree was constructed for the
FIVpco dataset comprised of all isolates recovered in the USA using PhyML56 with
6

the TN93 + G + I model and aLRT branch support; branches with &lt;80 support
were collapsed using TreeGraph257.
We used TempEst58 to assess data quality control of our generated data through
root-to-tip regression and observed largely varying deviations from the regression
line for many of the sequenced env genes. These deviations precluded the use of
strict or relaxed molecular clock models to analyse the data, and we hence decided
to move forward with the pol and ORFA sequence data. We used BEAST 1.10 59
with BEAGLE 3.160 to perform both discrete and continuous phylogeographic
analyses61 based on the concatenated pol and OFRFA sequences from each subtype
using an HKY substitution model (found most suitable for this smaller number of
sequences using ‘smart model selection’ in PhyML62). For FIVpco CO, we
performed Bayesian model selection on various model combinations comprising a
strict molecular clock and an uncorrelated relaxed clock model with an underlying
lognormal distribution, as well as three different coalescent models: a constant
population size model, an exponential growth model and a non-parametric
Bayesian skygrid model63. We also tested three relaxed random walk (RRW)
models of continuous diffusion for the phylogeographic analyses and included each
population (WUI and UB) as a discrete trait. All Bayesian model selection
experiments were performed by (log) marginal likelihood estimation using path
sampling and stepping-stone sampling64–67 (see Table S9). Multiple replicates were
run with different starting seeds to ensure convergence. Based on the outcome of
the Bayesian model selection procedure, we presented the results obtained for the
relaxed molecular clock models, the exponential population size coalescent model
and the Cauchy RRW model. For FIVpco WY, as there were only 6 sequences, we
applied a different approach as there was not enough data to obtain stable results
for these complicated evolutionary models. In this case, we assumed a strict clock
and constant population size and set the root prior to a uniform distribution (0,
300) reﬂecting our expectation that this subtype had been circulating for no more
than 300 years. For both subtypes, duplicate MCMC chains were run for 200
million generations, with trees and parameters sampled every 20,000 steps. We
used the program Tracer version 1.768 to examine ESS values (with parameter
estimates accepted if the ESS was &gt;200) and obtain HPD intervals for estimated
parameters.
To identify the hidden population structure in our time-scaled phylogenies, we
applied the ‘tree structure’ R package69 using the default values. This analytical
routine compares discrepancies between observed and idealised genealogies to
identify clades under differing epidemiological or demographic processes69. As we
did not have enough sequences to ﬁnd meaningful structure in FIVpco WY, we
limited this analysis to FIVpco CO. Any clades identiﬁed as signiﬁcantly departing
from the idealised geneology were further investigated using the R package
‘phylodyn’70 to estimate effective population size through time. This
nonparametric Bayesian approach uses integrated nested Laplace approximation
(INLA) to estimate effective population size efﬁciently, while accounting for
preferential sampling by modelling the sampling times as a Poisson process (see
ref. 71).
Host genomic data. We genotyped 130 pumas (76 individuals from the UB and 54
individuals from the WUI) using a ddRADseq approach (see ref. 26 for sequence
and bioinformatics details). From these genomic data, we quantiﬁed individual
relatedness using the inverse proportion of shared alleles (Dps72) and used the
resultant pairwise distance matrix in the downstream analyses. We also calculated
the Smouse measure of individual genetic distance39 to check if our results were
sensitive to the distance measure used. We were unsuccessful in obtaining ddRAD
data for seven individuals for which corresponding viral genomic data were
available (see Fig. 1) and for these individuals we used the mean population
relatedness value. Removing these individuals from the analyses did not qualitatively alter the results. Furthermore, we used the complete Dps dataset from all
individuals and interpolated this distance across each landscape using a kriging
approach. We converted this interpolated surface into a resistance raster in R and
calculated resistance distances between each individual with FIVpco sequence data
using a Circuitscape model, which uses circuit theory to accommodate uncertainty
in the route taken73. See https://github.com/nfj1380/ColoradoPumaFIVproject for
details.
We estimated a coalescent-based phylogeny with bootstrap support values using
SVD quartets74 as implemented in PAUP75. SVD quartets, which is currently
considered the most robust and computationally efﬁcient SNP-based phylogenetic
estimation method37 and uses a site-based approach (considering each SNP has an
independent genealogy) to estimate combinations of four-taxon relationships and
heuristically summarise the resulting trees into a species tree phylogeny37,74. We
evaluated a maximum of 100,000 random quartets using the QFM quartet
assembly method and the multispecies coalescent tree model for generating the
topology, and performed 100 bootstrap replicates for assessing topological branch
support for all terminal taxa.
Landscape data. We collected Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-based
landscape data that we hypothesized would be important for puma relatedness in
Colorado (see Table S7 for more detail on GIS data sources and ecological justiﬁcation for each landscape variable). This included percent impervious surface
(e.g., roads, buildings, etc.), land cover (forested, open-natural, and human
developed as sub-rasters), percentage tree canopy cover, vegetation density, rivers/

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streams, roads, minimum temperature of the coldest month, annual precipitation,
topographic roughness, and elevation. Resistance surfaces were created from this
landscape data using the Reclassify and Raster Calculator tools in ArcGIS v. 10.1.
We deﬁned resistance/conductance cost values based on expert opinion as well the
‘Resistance GA’76 routine in R. Resistance GA optimises resistance/conductance
surfaces based on the host pairwise genetic distances. We used this approach to test
which landscape variables best approximated host gene ﬂow and to formulate
optimized resistance surfaces for use in viral spread analyses. To run the Resistance
GA routine, we used an AIC objective function and tested all possible transformations (i.e. Ricker and Monomolecular transformations). As none of our landscape variables outperformed the null model in the UB region based on AICc, there
was no need to further estimate the overall multivariate resistance surface shaping
the host as more complex models get increasingly penalized in AICc scores (W.
Peterman pers. comm). For the WUI region, canopy cover and urban landscape
cover were within 2 AICc units of the best univariate model (spatial proximity),
thus we included both features to create a multivariate optimised surface. We
included resistance surfaces deﬁned by expert opinion as well as host genetic
optimized surfaces to help distinguish the effects of host genetics and landscape on
FIVpco spread. Mantel tests were used to screen for collinearity between surfaces
and for spatial autocorrelation prior to model construction.
We calculated the proportion of uninfected to infected individuals within a 5
km buffer (estimated average distance between individuals77) of each FIVpco
positive individual using the ‘summarize within’ tool (also in ArcGIS v. 10.1).
Estimates from each population were compared using a Mann–Whitney U Test.
Statistics and reproducibility
Impact of host relatedness and landscape resistance on viral spread. We used generalized dissimilarity modelling (GDM)35 to quantify if host relatedness and
landscape shaped FIVpco spread for FIVpco CO. GDM is a ﬂexible non-linear
regression approach that ﬁts monotonic I-spine functions to pairwise matrix data35
to describe the rate and magnitude of, in this case, FIVpco phylogenetic change. We
ﬁrst calculated FIVpco patristic distance (using the maximum clade credibility tree)
and converted this distance metric into a dissimilarity measure: dsFIVple ¼
�
�2
di
where d is pairwise distance. The host Dps matrix and all of the landmaxðd Þ

ARTICLE

conductance or resistance, relative to the conductance/resistance of a cell with a
minimum value set to “1”. For each environmental factor, we tested three different
values for k (i.e., 10, 100 and 1000). Finally, all these rasters were tested as potential
conductance factors (i.e., factors facilitating movement) and as possible resistance
factors (i.e., factors impeding movement). The statistic Q was used to estimate the
correlations between phylogenetic branch duration and environmental distances. Q
is deﬁned as the difference between two coefﬁcients of determination (R2): (i) R2
obtained when branch durations are regressed against environmental distances
computed on the environmental raster, and (ii) R2 obtained when branch durations
are regressed against environmental distances computed on a null raster, i.e., an
environmental raster with a value of “1” assigned to all the cells. For positive
distributions of estimated Q values (i.e., with at least 90% of positive values),
statistical support was then evaluated against a null distribution generated by a
randomization procedure and formalized as an approximated Bayes factor (BF)
support 84. To account for the uncertainty related to the Bayesian inference, this
analysis was based on 1000 trees sampled from the post-burn-in posterior distribution inferred using the continuous phylogeographic model. We performed two
distinct analyses, one per region, gathering all phylogenetic branches occurring on
each study area.
Ethics statement. Puma samples were collected as part of ongoing studies by
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) between 2006 and 2014. We handled all
pumas in accordance with approved CPW Animal Care and Use Committee
(ACUC) capture and handling protocols (ACUC ﬁle #08-2004, ACUC protocol
#03-2007 ACUC 16‐2008). Samples were provided to Colorado State University for
diagnostic evaluation. Colorado State University and Colorado Parks and Wildlife
(CPW) Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees reviewed and approved this
work prior to initiation (CSU IACUC protocol 05-061A).

Data availability
DNA sequences—GenBank accession numbers MN563193–MN563239. The sequence
alignment ﬁle used to create the phylogenies in this paper as well as the data to reproduce
the generalized dissimilarity models and phylogeographic models is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/nfj1380/ColoradoPumaFIVproject.

ij

scape resistance matrices were converted to dissimilarities the same way. Speciﬁcally, GDM uses generalized linear models (GLMs) to model FIVpco patristic
distance in the form of:
� �
� �
Xn
� lnðdsx Þ ¼ a0 þ
j fp xpi � fp xpj j
p¼1
where i and j are individual puma, a0 is the intercept, p is the number of covariates
and fp(x) have I-spline transformed versions of the predictors (see refs. 35,78 for
further details). We used a backward elimination model selection approach and
permutation tests (n = 99) to test for signiﬁcance35,79. The model with the highest
deviance (±2% deviance explained) with the smallest number of predictors was
reported. We performed GDM using the same predictor sets as in Trumbo et al.26
for each region but in our reduced dataset (i.e., with individuals with FIVpco data),
temperature and elevation were strongly correlated with space (Mantel r = 0.93).
We tested different values of K (see below) and treated each as resistance or
conductance surfaces yet this made no difference to the GDM models (we present
results from resistance surfaces only with K = 100). Analysis of FIVpco WY was not
possible given the small sample size.
We compared our non-linear GDM models to maximum likelihood of
population-estimate (MLPE) models36 to test the validity of our results. Instead of
ﬁtting non-linear splines, the MLPE approach uses linear mixed models to ﬁt
variables. We compared univariate MLPE models using Bayesian information
criterion (BIC) model selection.
Impact of environmental factors on viral dispersal velocity. The analysis of
the impact of environmental factors and host genetic differentiation on the dispersal velocity of viral lineages was performed using R functions of the package
“seraphim”80 (see refs. 81,82 for a similar workﬂow). In this analysis, each environmental factor, as well as the interpolated host genetic distance surface, was
described by a raster that deﬁnes its spatial heterogeneity and that was used to
compute an environmental distance for each branch in the phylogeny using two
different path models: (i) the least-cost path model, which uses a least-cost algorithm to determine the route taken between the starting and ending points83, and
(ii) the Circuitscape path model. Here, we investigated the impact of the environmental rasters listed in Table S5 as well as the resistance raster generated from
host genetic distance interpolation. We generated distinct land cover rasters from
the original categorical land cover raster (resolution = 0.5 arcmin) by creating
lower resolution rasters (2 arcmin) whose cell values equalled the number of
occurrences of each land cover category within the 2 arcmin cells81. For each
considered environmental factor, several distinct rasters were also generated by
transforming original raster cell values with the following formula: vt = 1 + k*(vo/
vmax), where vt and vo are the transformed and original raster cell values, and
vmax the maximum raster cell value recorded in the raster. The rescaling parameter
k here allowed the deﬁnition and testing of different strengths of raster cell

Code availability
All code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/nfj1380/ColoradoPumaFIVproject.

Received: 12 November 2019; Accepted: 25 November 2020;

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Acknowledgements
This project was funded by a National Science Foundation Ecology of Infectious Diseases
research program grants (DEB 1413925). M.C. was funded by the University of Minnesota’s Ofﬁce of the Vice President for Research and Academic Health Center Seed
Grant. G.B. acknowledges support from the Interne Fondsen KU Leuven/Internal Funds
KU Leuven under grant agreement C14/18/094, and the Research Foundation—Flanders
(“Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen,” G0E1420N). We thank Bill
Peterman for his advice on the resistanceGA pipeline.

ARTICLE

Author contributions
N.F.J. conducted the analysis and wrote the initial draft of the paper to which all authors
contributed. K.L. and M.A. studied the puma in the ﬁeld and provided the blood samples.
S.K., D.T., P.S., E.G. and S.V. collected virus and host genetic data. S.D., R.B. and G.B.
contributed to the biogeographic and phylogenetic analyses. M.C., S.V., C.F., H.E. and
S.C. conceived of the project.

Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information
Supplementary information is available for this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003020-01548-2.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to N.M.F.-J.
Reprints and permission information is available at http://www.nature.com/reprints
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional afﬁliations.

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,
adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give
appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless
indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the
article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory
regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from
the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
© The Author(s) 2021

COMMUNICATIONS BIOLOGY | (2021)4:12 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01548-2 | www.nature.com/commsbio

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