Moving Target(s): One Health at changing human-livestock-wildlife interfaces in tropical ecosystems

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. One Health approaches currently conceptualized for Western landscapes require fundamental rethinking for tropics, where human-livestock-wildlife interfaces exist as variegated mosaics rather than discrete zones. This overview examines why tropical ecosystems involve (i) Human mobility patterns shifting continuously through rural-urban migration and globalization (ii) Livestock health infrastructure concerns, creating dependencies on informal practitioners and perpetuating practices like diclofenac use cascading into public health disasters; and (iii) Environmental conditions that transform rapidly through agricultural intensification, habitat fragmentation, and climate change, while wildlife populations adapt to anthropogenic subsidies that fundamentally alter behavior and disease dynamics. Each component—human, livestock, environmental—changes independently while influencing the others, creating dynamic complexity amplified by economic inequities that shape health-seeking behaviors and risk perceptions. I argue that tropical One Health must embrace co-cultural frameworks recognizing interspecies cultural transmission, acknowledge how political-ecological forces structure disease interfaces, and develop context-appropriate interventions grounded in local social-ecological realities rather than imposing incompatible models. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2PW8T Animal Sciences, Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Food Science, Life Sciences, Systems Biology tropical ecosystems, zoonotic spillover, human-wildlife interfaces, co-cultures, migration ecology, veterinary infrastructure, global south, Health equity, disease emergence Published: 2025-12-18 04:19 Last Updated: 2025-12-18 04:19 CC-BY Attribution-No Derivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: Not Any Data and Code Availability Statement: Not Applicable Language: English