Simplification of vector communities during suburban succession

Abstract

Suburbanization is happening rapidly on a global scale, resulting in changes to the species assemblages present in previously undeveloped areas of land. Community-level changes after anthropogenic land-use change have been studied in a variety of organisms, but the effects on arthropods of medical and veterinary importance remain poorly characterized. Shifts in diversity, abundance, and community composition of such arthropods, like mosquitoes, can significantly impact vector-borne disease dynamics due to varying vectorial capacity between different species. In light of these potential implications for vector-borne diseases, we investigated changes in mosquito species assemblage after suburbanization by sampling mosquitoes in neighborhoods of different ages in Wake County, North Carolina, US. We found that independent of housing density and socioeconomic status, mosquito diversity measures decreased as suburban neighborhoods aged. In the oldest neighborhoods, the mosquito assemblage reached a distinct suburban climax community dominated by the invasive, peridomestic container-breeding Aedes albopictus , the Asian tiger mosquito. Aedes albopictus is a competent vector of many pathogens of human concern, and its dominance in suburban areas places it in close proximity with humans, allowing for heightened potential of host-vector interactions. While further research is necessary to explicitly characterize the effects of mosquito community simplification on vector-borne disease transmission in highly suburbanized areas, the current study demonstrates that suburbanization is disrupting mosquito communities so severely that they do not recover their diversity even 100 years after the initial disturbance. Our understanding of the community-level effects of anthropogenic land-use change on arthropod vectors will become increasingly important as we look to mitigate disease spread in a global landscape that is continually developed and altered by humans.

Increased mosquito abundance and species richness in Connecticut, United States 2001–2019

“…Our correlations of mosquito collections and land cover support previous short-term research on mosquito communities [13][14][15][16][17][18] : after accounting for surveillance effort, richness and evenness were highest in sites with a greater prevalence of forested land cover and lowest in sites with a greater prevalence of land cover associated with human developments. This trend in richness was further evident in our GLMMs of collections by latitudinal www.nature.com/scientificreports/ coordinate (which also reflect the dominant land cover gradient of urban to forested in CT).…”

“…There is some research that explores how mosquito communities are changing due to landscape-level dynamics. Previous studies on mosquito community structure have shown reductions in mosquito species richness and increases in the dominance of vectors of public health importance along forested to urban gradients 13 , simplification of mosquito community structure in homogenized landscapes 14 , changes in human risk of mosquito-borne pathogens linked to habitat disturbances 15,16 , and in some instances, increased mosquito species richness was associated with increased pathogen prevalence 17,18 . Globalization has also led to the introduction and establishment of mosquito species (and mosquito-borne pathogens) outside their evolutionary origins 19,20 .…”

Impact of Suburbanisation on Sustainable Development of Settlements in Suburban Spaces: Smart and New Solutions

“…On a global scale, suburbanisation takes place relatively quickly in terms of time, which often results in relatively rapid changes in different fauna and flora societies due to anthropogenic interventions, and thus, induced changes in the area, which may cause changes which are very difficult to reverse, e.g., in terms of the diversity, abundance and overall composition of the society [31] and the structure of individual food chains [32]. Suburbanisation also extensively affects watercourses and their ecosystems, and the more populated the area (e.g., the higher the density of population and built-up areas, networking by transport and technical infrastructure), the more difficult and costly it is to restore watercourses [33].…”

“…Eleven questions (Table 2) were selected for this interview from studies that discussed the environmental impact of the suburbanisation process [21,[31][32][33][34]39,62], which were further divided into two categories. The first category included four questions concerning the territorial development of the municipality.…”

Citizen science versus professional data collection: Comparison of approaches to mosquito monitoring in Germany

“…In this context, many citizen science projects successfully focus on mosquitoes (e.g. Bazin & Williams, 2018; Jordan et al., 2017; Kampen et al., 2015; Mwangungulu et al., 2016; Palmer et al., 2017; Spence Beaulieu et al., 2019), so that mosquito‐related programmes involving the public are being deployed in an increasing number of countries (e.g. Moore et al., 2019; Murindahabi et al., 2018).…”