D3008: Characterizing the spatiotemporal distribution of West Nile virus transmission in Florida using routine mosquito control and public health surveillance data

West Nile virus (WNV) is a mosquito borne disease that has medical and veterinary significance. In the state of Florida, Culex nigripalpus and Culex quinquefasciatus mosquitoes are considered the main WNV vectors, and multiple avian species amplify and maintain the virus in the natural environment. The Florida Department of Health (FDOH) and 46 Florida Mosquito Control Districts (FMCD) monitor for WNV transmission through weekly arboviral testing of sentinel chicken flocks. The data generated from these tests result in weekly reports outlining transmission to chickens in districts with monitoring programs; however, few studies have investigated seroconversion patterns over an extended time period or across the entire state. The objective of this study is to characterize spatiotemporal distributions of WNV sentinel chicken seroconversion in preparation for statistical analyses to help identify environmental variables contributing to observed patterns. We compiled and digitized paper copies of archived sentinel chicken seroconversion data from 2015 to 2019 using optical character recognition (OCR) technologies and incorporated data science approaches using R and OpenRefine to clean and integrate the records prior to mapping distributions in ArcGIS. Preliminary results indicated that the distribution of WNV seroconversion was consistent across districts with sentinel chicken programs and with known distributions of Culex nigripalpus and Culex quinquefasciatus mosquitoes, but the number of seroconversions fluctuated interannually across the study period. Seasonal distributions indicated high seroconversion across multiple geographic areas between the months of July and November, but additional sampling is needed in districts without sentinel programs to determine WNV transmission risk.