Classical biomonitoring techniques have focused primarily on measures linked to various biodiversity metrics and indicator species. Next-generation biomonitoring (NGB) describes a suite of tools and approaches that allow the examination of a broader spectrum of organizational levels-from genes to entire ecosystems. Here, we frame 10 key questions that we envisage will drive the field of NGB over the next decade. While Makiola et al. Questions for Next-Generation Biomonitoring not exhaustive, this list covers most of the key challenges facing NGB, and provides the basis of the next steps for research and implementation in this field. These questions have been grouped into current-and outlook-related categories, corresponding to the organization of this paper.

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Assessing mosquito biodiversity is important for disease surveillance and ecosystem health assessments. Such studies are particularly needed in regions like the Caribbean, which have experienced a series of recent mosquito borne disease outbreaks but received little attention regarding its invertebrate biodiversity. Here, we report on results from a mosquito survey on the Dutch Leeward Islands (Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten and Saba), carried out in April and October 2018, which is the first integrative survey since those conducted by Van der Kuyp (1947) and Wagenaar Hummelinck (1949). Moreover, we present a novel key for adults and fourth instar larvae of the mosquitoes of the Dutch Leeward Islands. Overall, eleven species were recorded, eight on Sint Maarten, five on Saba and two on Sint Eustatius. Two new potential disease vectors, Culex nigripalpus and Aedes taeniorhynchus, were recorded on Sint Maarten. One previously recorded species, Cx. habilitator, was not retrieved from any of the islands, which is further discussed in the paper. Species indicative of natural forest which previously occurred on all three islands were absent from Sint Eustatius and Sint Maarten but still present on Saba. In contrast, species indicative of human inhabitation, Ae. aegypti and Cx. quinquefasciatus, were highly abundant on Sint Maarten and Sint Eustatius and present in low numbers on Saba. Overall, the results of this study emphasize the importance of biodiversity surveys and indicate that frequent mosquito inventories may contribute to a better understanding of mosquito community composition and distribution of potential vector species.

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Mesocosm experiments enable researchers to study animal dynamics, but determining accurate estimates of survival and development rates of different life stages can be difficult, especially as the subjects may be hard to sample and mortality rates can be high. We propose a new methodology for estimating such parameters. We used an experimental set‐up with 48 aquatic mesocosms, each with 20 first instar mosquito larvae and under 1 of 12 treatments with varying temperatures and nutrient concentrations. We took daily subsamples of the aquatic life stages as well as counting the emerging adults. We developed a method to estimate the survival and development probabilities at each life stage, based on optimising a matrix population model. We used two different approaches, one assuming the difference between predictions and observations was normally distributed, and the other using a combination of a normal and a multinomial distribution. For each approach, the resulting optimisation problem had around 100 parameters, making conventional gradient descent ineffective with our limited number of data points. We solved this by computing the formal derivatives of our matrix model. Both approaches proved effective in predicting mosquito populations over time, also when compared against a separate validation dataset, and the two approaches produced similar results. They also both predicted similar trends in the survival and development probabilities for each life stage, although there were some differences in the actual values. The approach which only used the normal distribution was considerably more computationally efficient than the mixed distribution approach. This is an effective approach for determining the survival and development rates of small animals in mesocosm experiments. We have not found any other reliable methodology for estimating these parameters, especially not from incomplete data or when there are many different experimental treatments. This methodology enables researchers to gain a much more detailed understanding of the life cycles of small animals, potentially leading to advances in a wide range of areas, for example in mosquito‐borne disease risk or in considering the effects of biodiversity loss or climate change on different species.

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