Dataset Information

West Nile Virus Occurrence and Ecological Niche Modeling in Wild Bird Species and Mosquito Vectors: An Active Surveillance Program in the Peloponnese Region of Greece.

ABSTRACT: West Nile Virus (WNV) is maintained in nature in a bird-mosquito cycle and human infections follow a seasonal pattern, favored by climatic conditions. Peloponnese Region, located in Southern Greece, initiated an active WNV surveillance program to protect public health during 2019-2020. The project included monitoring of avian hosts and mosquito vectors, while sampling locations were prioritized after consideration of WNV circulation in birds, mosquitos and humans during previous seasons. Biological materials were collected from 493 wild birds of 25 species and 678 mosquito pools, which were molecularly screened for WNV presence. In this case, 14 environmental variables were associated with WNV detection in wild birds and mosquitos by using two separate MaxEnt models. Viral RNA was not detected in the target species during 2019, although in 2020, it was reported on 46 wild birds of ten species and 22 mosquito pools (Culex pipiens and Aedes albopictus). Altitude and land uses were significant predictors for both models and in fact, suitable conditions for virus occurrence were identified in low altitude zones. Bird- and mosquito-based surveillance systems yielded similar results and allowed for targeted vector control applications in cases of increased virus activity. Human cases were not reported on Peloponnese in 2020.

SUBMITTER: Sofia M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9320058 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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West Nile Virus Occurrence and Ecological Niche Modeling in Wild Bird Species and Mosquito Vectors: An Active Surveillance Program in the Peloponnese Region of Greece.

Sofia Marina M Giannakopoulos Alexios A Giantsis Ioannis A IA Touloudi Antonia A Birtsas Periklis P Papageorgiou Kontantinos K Athanasakopoulou Zoi Z Chatzopoulos Dimitris C DC Vrioni Georgia G Galamatis Dimitrios D Diamantopoulos Vassilis V Mpellou Spyridoula S Petridou Evanthia E Kritas Spyridon K SK Palli Matina M Georgakopoulos Giorgos G Spyrou Vassiliki V Tsakris Athanassios A Chaskopoulou Alexandra A Billinis Charalambos C

Microorganisms 20220630 7

West Nile Virus (WNV) is maintained in nature in a bird-mosquito cycle and human infections follow a seasonal pattern, favored by climatic conditions. Peloponnese Region, located in Southern Greece, initiated an active WNV surveillance program to protect public health during 2019-2020. The project included monitoring of avian hosts and mosquito vectors, while sampling locations were prioritized after consideration of WNV circulation in birds, mosquitos and humans during previous seasons. Biologi ...[more]

PMID: 35889046

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Project description:Mosquito vectors of eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) and West Nile virus (WNV) in the USA reside within broad multi-species assemblages that vary in spatial and temporal composition, relative abundances and vector competence. These variations impact the risk of pathogen transmission and the operational management of these species by local public health vector control districts. However, most models of mosquito vector dynamics focus on single species and do not account for co-occurrence probabilities between mosquito species pairs across environmental gradients. In this investigation, we use for the first time conditional Markov Random Fields (CRF) to evaluate spatial co-occurrence patterns between host-seeking mosquito vectors of EEEV and WNV around sampling sites in Manatee County, Florida. Specifically, we aimed to: (i) quantify correlations between mosquito vector species and other mosquito species; (ii) quantify correlations between mosquito vectors and landscape and climate variables; and (iii) investigate whether the strength of correlations between species pairs are conditional on landscape or climate variables. We hypothesized that either mosquito species pairs co-occur in patterns driven by the landscape and/or climate variables, or these vector species pairs are unconditionally dependent on each other regardless of the environmental variables. Our results indicated that landscape and bioclimatic covariates did not substantially improve the overall model performance and that the log abundances of the majority of WNV and EEEV vector species were positively dependent on other vector and non-vector mosquito species, unconditionally. Only five individual mosquito vectors were weakly dependent on environmental variables with one exception, Culiseta melanura, the primary vector for EEEV, which showed a strong correlation with woody wetland, precipitation seasonality and average temperature of driest quarter. Our analyses showed that majority of the studied mosquito species' abundance and distribution are insignificantly better predicted by the biotic correlations than by environmental variables. Additionally, these mosquito vector species may be habitat generalists, as indicated by the unconditional correlation matrices between species pairs, which could have confounded our analysis, but also indicated that the approach could be operationalized to leverage species co-occurrences as indicators of vector abundances in unsampled areas, or under scenarios where environmental variables are not informative.

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Dataset Information

West Nile Virus Occurrence and Ecological Niche Modeling in Wild Bird Species and Mosquito Vectors: An Active Surveillance Program in the Peloponnese Region of Greece.

Publications

West Nile Virus Occurrence and Ecological Niche Modeling in Wild Bird Species and Mosquito Vectors: An Active Surveillance Program in the Peloponnese Region of Greece.

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