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Abstract Vector-borne diseases pose a persistent and increasing challenge to human, animal, and agricultural systems globally. Mathematical modeling frameworks incorporating vector trait responses are powerful tools to assess risk and predict vector-borne disease impacts. Developing these frameworks and the reliability of their predictions hinge on the availability of experimentally derived vector trait data for model parameterization and inference of the biological mechanisms underpinning transmission. Trait experiments have generated data for many known and potential vector species, but the terminology used across studies is inconsistent, and accompanying publications may share data with insufficient detail for reuse or synthesis. The lack of data standardization can lead to information loss and prohibits analytical comprehensiveness. Here, we present MIReVTD, a Minimum Information standard for Reporting Vector Trait Data. Our reporting checklist balances completeness and labor- intensiveness with the goal of making these important experimental data easier to find and reuse, without onerous effort for scientists generating the data. To illustrate the standard, we provide an example reproducing results from anAedes aegyptimosquito study. 

Abstract The capacity of arthropod populations to adapt to long-term climatic warming is currently uncertain. Here we combine theory and extensive data to show that the rate of their thermal adaptation to climatic warming will be constrained in two fundamental ways. First, the rate of thermal adaptation of an arthropod population is predicted to be limited by changes in the temperatures at which the performance of four key life-history traits can peak, in a specific order of declining importance: juvenile development, adult fecundity, juvenile mortality and adult mortality. Second, directional thermal adaptation is constrained due to differences in the temperature of the peak performance of these four traits, with these differences expected to persist because of energetic allocation and life-history trade-offs. We compile a new global dataset of 61 diverse arthropod species which provides strong empirical evidence to support these predictions, demonstrating that contemporary populations have indeed evolved under these constraints. Our results provide a basis for using relatively feasible trait measurements to predict the adaptive capacity of diverse arthropod populations to geographic temperature gradients, as well as ongoing and future climatic warming. 

VecDyn Explorer hosts spatio-temporal population dynamics (i.e. seasonality) data on vectors (or potential vectors) of human, plant, and animal diseases. It includes a user-friendly GUI interface that provides simple visualizations of datasets to facilitate exploration of the data as well as an API to enable direct downloading of user selected datasets. VecDyn is hosted by the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing, and is being developed and maintained as part of the NSF funded VectorByte Initiative (www.vectorbyte.org).