Mosquito advance in hotter weather
Research Background
Vector-borne diseases continue to be a major contributor to the global burden of disease, annually causing more than 1 billion infections, 1 million deaths, and accounting for around 17% of all lost life, illness and disability globally. Insect vectors cannot regulate their internal temperature and are therefore responsive to shifts in climatic conditions over short (e.g. daily weather), medium (e.g. seasons) and long (e.g. El Niño, climate change) time frames. Understanding how vectors respond to climatic factors is thus central to characterising the spatio-temporal distributions of vector-borne diseases and anticipating and responding to potential shifts in risk due to climate change.
While correlative methods have proved useful for modelling species’ distributions on the basis of species’ reported occurrence data, when considering potentially invasive disease vectors mechanistic approaches have a number of important advantages in terms of applicability to novel environments. Here, we explore the use of an alternative type of mechanistic model, termed a phenology model to examine environmental suitability for the development of the invasive arboviral vector Aedes aegypti.
This study is featured in multiple media, including Financial Times (link).
Research Objective
The objectives of the study are to design, develop and validate a phenology model incorporating the development of each life stage of Ae. aegypti and apply it to explore changes in LCC intensity for this vector in response to past and projected climate changes globally. The phenology modelling framework allows us to use daily climatic inputs to capture the fine scale effects of daily temperature variation on key development rates of mosquitoes at different stages. Then, the model makes mechanistic historical projections of LCC intensity over a 100-year period (1950–2050) under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 climate change scenarios, which reflect differences in the degree to which greenhouse gas emissions and consequent climatic changes may be curbed by the middle of this century33.
