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ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND SPATIOTEMPORAL MOSQUITO-BORNE DISEASE MODELING ACROSS A GRADIENT OF URBANIZATION
Citation:
Myer, M. AND JohnM Johnston. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AND SPATIOTEMPORAL MOSQUITO-BORNE DISEASE MODELING ACROSS A GRADIENT OF URBANIZATION. ACES 2018, Washington, DC, December 03 - 06, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
Presented at ACES 2018
Description:
Vector-borne diseases are increasing in geographic extent and incidence in the United States and worldwide. Municipalities allocate resources to control arthropod vectors to protect human health using the best available information. The combined impacts of human-mediated ecosystem change and a changing climate provide new habitats for disease vectors, enable the rapid spread of infectious disease, and alter the dynamic ecosystem services that govern interactions between vector, reservoir, host, and disease agent. Understanding those processes is an important part of efforts to identify, predict, and prevent vector-borne disease. We worked with two municipalities to utilize mosquito-borne disease surveillance datasets and develop models to forecast spatiotemporal disease incidence. In Suffolk County, New York and Nassau County, New York we obtained West Nile Virus surveillance data from 2008-2015 and 2001-2015 respectively. Suffolk and Nassau Counties, on Long Island, New York, represent a gradient of development from rural to urban land cover, allowing us to examine the differences in West Nile Virus incidence and the ecosystem services differences between those development types. We used the INLA SPDE (Integrated Nested Laplace Approximations, Stochastic Partial Differential Equations) Bayesian method to fit spatiotemporal models of West Nile Virus incidence in Culex spp. in Suffolk and Nassau counties. These methods allowed us to identify spatial and temporal patterns and more accurately model disease incidence and mosquito abundance. In each municipality we began with a substantial pool of remote-sensed and publicly available datasets including land use/land cover, vegetation indices, and census data. Our results indicated that in the more rural and exurban Suffolk County, on-site septic disposal was a significant predictor of West Nile incidence, while the presence of woody wetlands was associated with a reduction in disease incidence. Septic systems in the area are a major contributor to nitrogen pollution and eutrophication, which may have a connection to reduction in healthy wetland habitat. In suburban and urban Nassau County, we found that areas with both high vegetative index and high intensity development had lowered disease incidence, indicating that areas of intermediate development are at risk in suburban areas. Emergent herbaceous wetlands were associated with a reduction in incidence, paralleling results in Suffolk County. A further study in Brownsville, Texas is in preliminary stages, examining Aedes aegypti and Albopictus populations in an urban area of concern for the spread of Zika virus. This research highlights the differences in variables that influence mosquito-borne disease dynamics across a gradient of urbanization, in addition to ecosystem services. In rural and exurban areas, disease incidence was affected by woody wetlands and the presence of septic systems that can adversely affect water quality, while suburban and urban areas provided ample habitat for mosquitoes and disease reservoirs in locations of medium-intensity development. We conclude that human development is a primary driver of West Nile virus incidence, while ecosystem services deriving from healthy wetland ecosystems and surface water habitats can have a protective effect.
