Abstract
Changes to Australia’s climate and land-use patterns could result in expanded spatial and temporal distributions of endemic mosquito vectors including Aedes and Culex species that transmit medically important arboviruses. Climate and land-use changes greatly influence the suitability of habitats for mosquitoes and their behaviors such as mating, feeding and oviposition. Changes in these behaviors in turn determine future species-specific mosquito diversity, distribution and abundance. In this review, we discuss climate and land-use change factors that influence shifts in mosquito distribution ranges. We also discuss the predictive and epidemiological merits of incorporating these factors into a novel integrated statistical (SSDM) and mechanistic species distribution modelling (MSDM) framework. One potentially significant merit of integrated modelling is an improvement in the future surveillance and control of medically relevant endemic mosquito vectors such as Aedes vigilax and Culex annulirostris, implicated in the transmission of many arboviruses such as Ross River virus and Barmah Forest virus, and exotic mosquito vectors such as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. We conducted a focused literature search to explore the merits of integrating SSDMs and MSDMs with biotic and environmental variables to better predict the future range of endemic mosquito vectors. We show that an integrated framework utilising both SSDMs and MSDMs can improve future mosquito-vector species distribution projections in Australia. We recommend consideration of climate and environmental change projections in the process of developing land-use plans as this directly impacts mosquito-vector distribution and larvae abundance. We also urge laboratory, field-based researchers and modellers to combine these modelling approaches. Having many different variations of integrated (SDM) modelling frameworks could help to enhance the management of endemic mosquitoes in Australia. Enhanced mosquito management measures could in turn lead to lower arbovirus spread and disease notification rates.
Highlights
Australia has a diverse climate range [1], and several of its climatic zones are currently experiencing an increased rate of climatic and land-use changes [2, 3]
Mosquitoes belonging to the genera Aedes and Culex are generally thought to be of greatest importance, but there are species belonging to the genera Anopheles, Coquillettidia, Mansonia and Verrallina that hold potential as both nuisance-biting pests and vectors of pathogens, including more than 75 medically important arboviruses in Australia [7,8,9]
The spread of most of these arboviruses in Australia is amplified locally through mosquito-human and mosquito-animal transmission cycles [12, 13], there is currently no record of local transmission of Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and Zika virus (ZIKV) by endemic mosquitoes. These specific viruses have only been reported in infected travelers entering Australia [14, 15], but experimental evidence indicates that some endemic haplotypes of the exotic mosquito, Aedes aegypti L., can competently transmit them, along with Dengue virus (DENV), this mosquito is currently limited in distribution to central and far north Queensland [16,17,18]
Summary
Australia has a diverse climate range [1], and several of its climatic zones (e.g. tropical, subtropical and temperate) are currently experiencing an increased rate of climatic and land-use changes [2, 3]. We assess mosquito dispersal, mosquito abundance, and drivers of abundance, diversity and the capacity of integrated species dissemination models to project the most likely future habitat of medically relevant endemic and exotic mosquito vectors under current and future environmental change scenarios.
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