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Mosquitoes and the pathogens they carry are increasingly common in urban areas throughout the globe. With urban landscapes, the need to manage mosquitoes is driven by the health risks and nuisance complaints associated with mosquitoes. Controlling the number of mosquitoes may reduce the overall risk of disease transmission but may not reduce nuisance complaints. This study focuses on Maricopa County in Arizona, USA, to investigate the relationship between mosquito abundance and landscape-level and sociodemographic factors on resident perceptions of mosquitoes. We used boosted regression trees to compare how mosquito abundance, collected from Maricopa Vector Control, and landscape factors and social factors, assessed through the Phoenix Area Social Survey, influence survey respondents’ reporting of mosquitoes as a problem. Results show that the landscape and sociodemographic features play a prominent role in how individuals perceive mosquitoes as a problem; specifically, respondents’ perception of their local landscape as messy and the distance to landscape features such as wetlands have more substantial roles in shaping perceptions. This work can highlight how potential mosquito and non-mosquito-related communications and management efforts may improve residents’ satisfaction with mosquito control or other wildlife management efforts, which can help inform best practices for vector control agencies.
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Ecological Requirements for Abundance and Dispersion of Brazilian Yellow Fever Vectors in Tropical Areas
In the Americas, wild yellow fever (WYF) is an infectious disease that is highly lethal for some non-human primate species and non-vaccinated people. Specifically, in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Haemagogus leucocelaenus and Haemagogus janthinomys mosquitoes act as the major vectors. Despite transmission risk being related to vector densities, little is known about how landscape structure affects vector abundance and movement. To fill these gaps, we used vector abundance data and a model-selection approach to assess how landscape structure affects vector abundance, aiming to identify connecting elements for virus dispersion in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Our findings show that Hg. leucocelaenus and Hg. janthinomys abundances, in highly degraded and fragmented landscapes, are mainly affected by increases in forest cover at scales of 2.0 and 2.5 km, respectively. Fragmented landscapes provide ecological corridors for vector dispersion, which, along with high vector abundance, promotes the creation of risk areas for WYF virus spread, especially along the border with Minas Gerais state, the upper edges of the Serra do Mar, in the Serra da Cantareira, and in areas of the metropolitan regions of São Paulo and Campinas.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2225023
- PAR ID:
- 10544551
- Publisher / Repository:
- Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1660-4601
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 609
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph21050609
