Table 1. Examples of latent parameters and their proxy measures at each stratum of a typical ecosystem. A broad statistical method used to infer the respective latent parameter is also suggested. As the strata increase with respect to the number of organisms present, the statistical methods that may be used to infer common latent parameters become broader. Consequently, a large variety of spatio-temporal methods may be used to infer latent parameters above the host level using proxy data. As the strata represent more complex latent data, the need for spatial temporal modelling techniques—such as Bayesian state-space models—that can account for this complexity increase, and the number of commonly reported statistical methodologies to infer common latent parameters decrease. A whole-system model would be a spatio-temporal modelling technique able to infer latent parameters within any stratum of an epidemiological system, which may themselves be dependent on latent parameters in other strata.