Fig. 1

The maintenance community concept. The upper panel represents 7 Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTC) host species including cattle, domestic animals other than cattle (sheep, goat), and wildlife (red and fallow deer, wild boar, badger) and their space-time coincidence (represented by the line thickness) in the Iberian Peninsula, as assessed through camera trap networks. The lower panel shows how the competence of a host community to maintain MTC circulation over time is larger in multi-host systems (at higher host species richness) than in single- or two-host ones. (modified from references [6] and [9])