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Q&A ViewAttendees 7

Medical, Urban, and Veterinary Entomology

10-Minute Paper

MUVE: Mosquito and Other Nematoceran Flies: Behavior and Ecology

Investigating the strength of mosquito co-occurrence patterns across heterogeneous landscapes

Tuesday, November 2, 2021
1:54 PM – 2:06 PM MT
Location: Colorado Convention Center, Meeting Room 210-212
In-Person
Changing habitats, resulting from increased development, water management efforts, and agriculture practices, can affect the number of mosquito species present at a location, their co-occurrences, and overall abundances, which can impact pathogen circulation and create opportunities for transmission. A logical first step to understanding how landscape change impacts mosquito communities is to characterize the diversity of mosquito communities across an area and to quantify the probability of co-occurrence between individual mosquito species conditioned on different landscape variables. We utilized routine mosquito control district surveillance data from 56 trap locations in Manatee County, Florida collected weekly from May 1 – November 30, 2020 to quantify relationships between landscape variables and alpha diversity and the probability of co-occurrence between individual mosquito species conditioned on environmental variables. Models were generated using conditional Markov Random fields with mean number of mosquitoes per trap night for each species at each site serving as response variables and percentage developed, cropland, herbaceous wetland, and woody wetland landscapes within 5 km of trap sites serving as environmental variables. Results indicated that species richness values decreased with increasing percentages of developed landcover, but Shannon’s diversity index values increased with developed landcover. The probability of co-occurrence between most species pairs was not conditional on landscape variables, but some medically important and nuisance-biting mosquitoes were conditional on landscapes. Results also provide basis for validating diversity:landscape relationships by investigating whether community dynamics revealed by longitudinal population surveillance at sites that tend to change landscape designation over time will predictably track those changes.