Defining the roles of local precipitation and anthropogenic water sources in driving the abundance of Aedes aegypti, an emerging disease vector in urban, arid landscapes.

ABSTRACT: Understanding drivers of disease vectors' population dynamics is a pressing challenge. For short-lived organisms like mosquitoes, landscape-scale models must account for their highly local and rapid life cycles. Aedes aegypti, a vector of multiple emerging diseases, has become abundant in desert population centers where water from precipitation could be a limiting factor. To explain this apparent paradox, we examined Ae. aegypti abundances at > 660 trapping locations per year for 3 years in the urbanized Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix), Arizona, USA. We created daily precipitation layers from weather station data using a kriging algorithm, and connected localized daily precipitation to numbers of mosquitoes trapped at each location on subsequent days. Precipitation events occurring

SUBMITTER: Newman EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10808563 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature