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. 2019 Mar;35(1):75-83.
doi: 10.2987/18-6781.1.

Rescuing Troves of Hidden Ecological Data to Tackle Emerging Mosquito-Borne Diseases

Samuel S C Rund, Imelda K Moise, John C Beier, Micaela Elvira Martinez

Rescuing Troves of Hidden Ecological Data to Tackle Emerging Mosquito-Borne Diseases

Samuel S C Rund et al. J Am Mosq Control Assoc. 2019 Mar.

Abstract

Despite the major impact of mosquitoes on human health, knowledge gaps exist regarding their natural population dynamics. Even the most basic information-such as spatiotemporal abundance-is mostly unavailable. In the USA, municipalities have created agencies for mosquito control and monitoring, yet no national open-access repository for mosquito surveillance data exists. Vectors, and the pathogens they transmit, know no jurisdictions. We identify >1,000 mosquito control agencies and identify those which make their population abundance surveillance data publicly available. We directly survey Floridian mosquito districts to estimate, from one state alone, the potential amount of hidden data. We generate a large, standardized data set from publicly available online data and demonstrate that spatiotemporal population abundance can be reconstructed and analyzed across data generators. We propose that the ensemble of US mosquito control agencies can, and should, be used to develop a national-and potentially international-open-access repository of mosquito surveillance data, generating the data capital needed to gain a mechanistic understanding of vector population dynamics, and identify existing digital infrastructure that could be leveraged for digitizing and collating extant and future surveillance data for such a repository.

Keywords: Arbovirus; Big Data; Zika; open data; surveillance.

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Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Map indicating the location of mosquito control agencies we identified (yellow points). Some agencies made their data publicly available (those with a line projection; see Table S1). Time series (gray and orange circles) show the collection dates and the number of genera whose abundance was reported in our data. Each time series represents 1 data silo (see Table S2). Despite the enormous amount of data (shown are >39,000 trap collections), far more exist. Each agency is a potential data source. (inset) Example time series of Culex abundance from one agency, the Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Project, which had 5 trap locations in their jurisdiction. Culex is of epidemiological interest because it is the genus containing species that transmit West Nile virus.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Culex pipiens seasonality from disparate regions of the country can be reconstructed from diverse data silos. We searched the compiled data for taxonomic groups for which we had 3 or more years of data from multiple states. Black points show the raw data from each trap within the state and correspond to the left y-axis. Blue time series are aggregated data across traps within the state, corresponding to the right y-axis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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