Mining new sources of natural history observations for disease interactions.

Keywords: anther smut; biogeography; Caryophyllaceae; citizen science; disease ecology; epidemiology; herbarium; Microbotryum; natural history collections; phenology I Microbotryum i species can also occur on several other plant families (Piatek et al., [47]; Kemler et al., [34]) and, in some cases, cause other forms of smut diseases (e.g., ovary smut, whole-flower smut or leaf smut) (Kashefi and Vánky, [33]; Lui et al., [40]). Among the 43 plant species in the Caryophyllaceae where anther smut was found in the iNaturalist survey (Table), all have perennial life histories, consistent with conclusions of prior studies (Thrall et al., [60]; Hood et al., [32]). This similarity in disease incidence is consistent with prior indications that anther smut generally goes unrecognized by a botanist when making field collections for herbarium use (Antonovics et al., [9]), and thus disease proportion among total observations can be a relatively objective measure for comparisons of disease incidence among host taxa. Anther smut, biogeography, Caryophyllaceae, citizen science, disease ecology, epidemiology, herbarium, Microbotryum, natural history collections, phenology. [Extracted from the article]