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Q&A ViewAttendees 6

Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology

Student Competition 10-Minute Paper

Grad MUVE: Mosquitos

Community-driven mosquito egg collections yield high-quality data for Aedes (Diptera: Culicidae) mosquito surveillance

Monday, November 1, 2021
10:30 AM - 10:42 AM MT
Location: Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room 503-504
In-Person Student Competition

    Presenting Author(s)

  • Corey Day

    Ph.D. Student
    University of Tennessee
    Knoxville, Tennessee

    • Co-Author(s)

  • CB

    Caroline Barnes

    Undergraduate Student
    University of Tennessee
    Knoxville, Tennessee

  • KB

    Kurt Butefish

    Director
    Tennessee Geographic Alliance
    Knoxville, Tennessee

  • MC

    Michael Camponovo

    GIS Outreach Coordinator
    University of Tennessee
    Knoxville, Tennessee

  • JA

    Julie Andsager

    Professor
    University of Tennessee
    Knoxville, Tennessee

  • BS

    Brian H. Smith

    Geospatial Academies Co-Facilitator
    Arizona State University
    Tempe, Arizona

  • JR

    Joshua Rosenberg

    Assistant Professor
    University of Tennessee
    Knoxville, Tennessee

  • Rebecca T. Trout Fryxell

    Associate Professor
    University of Tennessee, Knoxville
    Knoxville, Tennessee

Citizen science and community-driven vector surveillance programs are increasingly popular approaches to enhancing vector surveillance. These programs train volunteers to collect vectors and submit either their physical collections or images of their collections to professionals for identification. There are several advantages to this approach, including the acquisition of data from greater geographic ranges than what is possible for standard surveillance programs; however, the resemblance of data collected by volunteers to data collected by professionals has rarely been investigated. In 2019 and 2020, we implemented an ovitrap-based community-driven mosquito surveillance program with educators and their students to collect Aedes mosquitoes. Concurrently, we also deployed ovitraps at similar sites using identical methods to test the overarching hypothesis that a community-driven mosquito surveillance program can provide useful mosquito surveillance data. To test this hypothesis, we compared the egg collections and subsequently reared adults collected by the community to those collected by our laboratory. In the first year, there was a significant difference in weekly egg abundance between our data and the community data, suggesting an overall dissimilarity between the two datasets. In the second year, the two datasets were highly similar, demonstrating that educators collected data that was reflective of the data collected by our laboratory. We show that following year-to-year improvements in the community-driven mosquito surveillance program, our community partners collected high quality egg abundance data that can supplement standard mosquito surveillance and be used in ecological studies. (Learn more about this study and the community-driven program at www.megabitess.org.)