Alignment dynamics: how environmental restoration reshapes disease risk

Konstans Wells , Jonathan Walker, Alexander Vaux, Jolyon Medlock , Tamsyn Uren Webster

Ecological change can generate variable infectious disease outcomes even when it produces similar shifts in biodiversity, habitat structure, or pathogen hazard. Existing disease-ecology frameworks identify the components and pathways governing transmission, but less explicitly formalise how their relative timing and spatial organisation determine when transmission opportunities emerge. We argue that realised disease risk arises from the spatiotemporal alignment of hazard, exposure, and regulatory processes. Given that these processes respond asynchronously to environmental and socio-ecological change, disease risk is best understood as a dynamic state generated by the alignment of these processes rather than as a direct consequence of hazard alone. We introduce two complementary concepts, coupling regimes and alignment trajectories, to describe how transmission systems differ in the organisation of hazard, exposure, and regulation, and how these relationships change through time.
We characterise coupling regimes through response-time hierarchy, spatial coupling structure, exposure elasticity and regulation latency, and derive hypotheses concerning dynamic alignment, differential ecological and social clocks, and epidemiological decoupling.
Ecological restoration provides a powerful context for observing these dynamics because it simultaneously reorganises multiple ecological and social processes operating on different timescales. By formalising alignment dynamics, this perspective provides a comparative framework for understanding, predicting, and managing disease risk under ecological change.