Ecological & Environmental Drivers of Antimicrobial Resistance in the Environment

The rise of bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a major threat to both human and animal health. Addressing this challenge requires a comprehensive understanding of how AMR spreads across the interconnected One Health compartments, humans, animals, and the environment. Limiting the dissemination of AMR in and through the environment demands insights into the ecological and evolutionary drivers, including both biotic factors such as microbial community composition, host range, and interspecies interactions, and abiotic factors such as temperature, nutrient availability, pollutants, and hydrological connectivity. These drivers act in concert with environmental dispersal barriers that shape the persistence and mobility of resistance elements. This presentation will explore the key processes underpinning the environmental spread of AMR, with a focus on horizontal gene transfer, microbial invasion, and selective pressures that favor resistant populations.

Dr Uli Klümper is a permanent, senior researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany. His research (57 publications, H-Index: 25) focuses on understanding the proliferation of antimicrobial resistance, with particular emphasis on the ecological and evolutionary processes driving the spread and selection of antibiotic resistance genes and plasmids in complex bacterial communities. He investigates how environmental drivers influence their abundance, combining the development and application of microbiological and molecular methods to quantify plasmid transfer and gene mobility with mathematical modelling and bioinformatic analyses of ecological dynamics. He has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship and secured competitive research funding from sources including the EU Horizon 2020 programme, the German Environment Agency, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of the German “One Health Platform”, advises the German Environment Agency on defining safe levels of antibiotic pollution, and is a member of the editorial board of npj Antimicrobials & Resistance.