Bat anthropogenic roosting ecology influences taxonomic and geographic predictions of zoonotic risk

The ability of wildlife to live in anthropogenic structures is widely observed across many animal species. As proximity to humans is an important risk factor for pathogen transmission, anthropogenic roosting may have important consequences for predicting virus spillover and spillback of viruses. For bats, the influence of roosting in anthropogenic structures on predicting virus hosting ability and diversity is poorly understood. Using machine learning, we analyze novel roosting ecology data to assess the importance of anthropogenic roosting in predicting viral outcomes and evaluate how this trait affects the prediction of undetected but likely host species. The importance of anthropogenic roosting varies across viral outcomes, being most important for virus hosting ability and less so for zoonotic virus hosting ability, viral richness, and the proportion of zoonotic viruses harbored by bats. Across viral outcomes, anthropogenic roosting is less important than human population density but more important than most family, diet, and foraging traits. Models with anthropogenic roosting extended the list of undetected zoonotic host species compared to models excluding this trait. Predicted virus host distributions show distinct spatial patterns between anthropogenic and natural roosting bats. These findings suggest anthropogenic roosting has a non-trivial role in predicting viral outcomes in bats.