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Approximately twenty-one years of historical mosquito abundance and species surveillance data, collected by the University of Notre Dame and the St. Joseph County (IN) Health Department, from 1976 to 1997 are made available following a data rescue effort. St. Joseph County is a county in Indiana, located on the Michigan-Indiana border, 35 miles from Lake Michigan. The collected data will allow for trends in species to be followed over a wide time range and facilitate further research regarding mosquito-borne diseases, species distribution, phenology and ecological changes over time. 

Abstract A growing body of information on vector-borne diseases has arisen as increasing research focus has been directed towards the need for anticipating risk, optimizing surveillance, and understanding the fundamental biology of vector-borne diseases to direct control and mitigation efforts. The scope and scale of this information, in the form of data, comprising database efforts, data storage, and serving approaches, means that it is distributed across many formats and data types. Data ranges from collections records to molecular characterization, geospatial data to interactions of vectors and traits, infection experiments to field trials. New initiatives arise, often spanning the effort traditionally siloed in specific research disciplines, and other efforts wane, perhaps in response to funding declines, different research directions, or lack of sustained interest. Thusly, the world of vector data – the Vector Data Ecosystem – can become unclear in scope, and the flows of data through these various efforts can become stymied by obsolescence, or simply by gaps in access and interoperability. As increasing attention is paid to creating FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable, and Reusable) data, simply characterizing what is ‘out there’, and how these existing data aggregation and collection efforts interact, or interoperate with each other, is a useful exercise. This study presents a snapshot of current vector data efforts, reporting on level of accessibility, and commenting on interoperability using an illustration to track a specimen through the data ecosystem to understand where it occurs for the database efforts anticipated to describe it (or parts of its extended specimen data). 

A growing body of information on vector-borne diseases has arisen as increasing research focus has been directed towards the need for anticipating risk, optimizing surveillance, and understanding the fundamental biology of vector-borne diseases to direct efforts to control and mitigation. The scope and scale of this information, in the form of data, comprising database efforts, data storage, and serving approaches, mean that it is distributed across many formats and data types. Data ranges from collections records to molecular characterization, geospatial data to interactions of vectors and traits, infection experiments to field trials. New initiatives arise, often spanning the effort traditionally siloed in specific research disciplines, and other efforts wane, perhaps in response to funding declines, different research directions, or lack of sustained interest. Thusly, the world of vector data - the Vector Data Ecosystem - can become unclear in scope, and the flows of data through these various efforts can become stymied by obsolescence, or simply by gaps in access and interoperability. As increasing attention is paid to creating FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable, and Reusable) data, simply characterizing what is ‘out there’, and how these existing data aggregation and collection efforts interact, or interoperate with each other, is a useful exercise. This website and related project presents a list of vector data curation efforts, a brief description of their stated scope and purpose, and level of accessibility. The Vector Data Ecosystem 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). 

VecTraits is a searchable database of hundreds of datasets on the traits of 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. VecTraits 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). 

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).