Print PageAfter decades of neglect and treatment as an incidental nuisance, mosquito populations in the United States Southwest are resurgent and have become the focus of increased attention as a health hazard vectoring West Nile Virus, along with other potential diseases, including dengue fever. An interdisciplinary team of entomologists, climatologists, remote sensors, spatial theorists, and political ecologists have joined together to answer four distinct questions in understanding disease vectors in 1) How do micro-environmental conditions affect mosquitoes over space and time? 2) How are these biophysical and environmental conditions distributed across complex conurbations, like those of Tucson and Phoenix? 3) How do local households manipulate or produce mosquito habitat (landscapes and water)?, and 4) How do agencies and personnel charged with mosquito management understand and define mosquito geographies and to what degree do their jurisdictions and political capacities overlap with the geography of the insect? Methods of analysis include A) direct sampling of mosquito populations, B) the employment of a Dynamic Mosquito Simulation Model (DyMSiM), C) the creation of high-resolution mosquito habitat potential surfaces, integrating LiDAR & Multispectral data, D) surveys and interviews with residents and neighborhood associations, and E) organizational ethnographies of management agencies and personnel. The results are integrated through participatory geovisualization exercises involving managers and members of the public.
Results/Conclusions
Preliminary results suggest that the micro-habitats and climates governing mosquito abundance are highly spatially uneven across the city, though associated with vegetation densities linked to urban development. So too, climate change scenarios have been shown to result in lengthening of the mosquito season within these patches areas, as well as the likelihood of over-wintering. Institutional analysis shows problematically high levels of specialization by agencies, which focus on either the larval or adult stages of mosquito development. Preliminary discussions with homeowners suggest linkages of habitat management with micro-scale neighborhood conflicts over amenities, home care, and housing values. We further conclude that the overall methodological protocol developed here, involving ecological observation and modeling integrated with urban political ecology through geovisualization, lends itself extremely well to cognate problems, including peri-urban fire hazards, invasive species management, and urban wildlife conflicts.
