Abstract
Abstract. The continuous expansion of invasive Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, combined to its ability to transmit arboviruses (e.g. dengue, chikungunya) is raising major public health concern in Europe. In Switzerland, the mosquito is firmly established in most urban areas of the Canton of Ticino, south of the Alps, and there is a real risk that it will colonize also urban areas north of the Alps in the next years. The spatial distribution and colonization of new areas by Ae. albopictus depends on several environmental parameters, such as winter and summer temperatures, and precipitation patterns. A key factor for Ae. albopictus to establish at higher latitudes is the capability to develop cold-tolerant overwintering diapausing eggs under specific environmental conditions. Weather-driven abundance models are used to map the areas of potential distribution and to predict temporal dynamics of Ae. albopictus and the transmission potential of arboviruses. This contribution presents the designed system that integrates low-cost and on-line IoT sensors to monitor temperature, humidity and light with istSOS an OGC Sensor Observation Service server implementation with a user friendly interface and rich feature collection to easily manage this sensor network and distribute data in a standard way (www.istsos.org).
Highlights
In Switzerland, as in the rest of Europe, there is an increasing awareness for the introduction and expansion of exotic invasive mosquito species
The proposed study presents the results of the implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) using an open source approach to monitor catch basin microhabitat in four cities in Switzerland
Considering the final purpose of the project, the presented work tries to understand on one hand if the new Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, together with an open source approach, can help in building a WSN at low-cost and on the other if it can perform well in adverse microhabitat with poor quality signal
Summary
In Switzerland, as in the rest of Europe, there is an increasing awareness for the introduction and expansion of exotic invasive mosquito species. According to predictions based on a climate driven large-scale model, this mosquito species was expected to spread in part of the Swiss Plateau and in the area of the Lake Geneva while other areas, such as Zurich and Basel, seemed to have too cold winter seasons for the survival of the diapausing eggs (Neteler et al, 2013). The presence of urban heat islands and particular microhabitats can favour the winter survival of eggs (Ravasi et al, 2018). The monitoring of such microhabitats might allow us to better understand the environmental conditions and act in time to monitor and contain the establishment of this invasive species
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