(HEU Horizon Europe 21-27) The East Asian mosquitoes species Aedes albopictus and Ae. koreicus are invading several European countries, posing an increasing threat to human and animal public health. The life cycle of mosquitoes is strongly driven by temperature, making feasible the implementation of mathematical models predicting their distribution, population dynamics, and arbovirus transmission risk to support mosquito and Mosquito-Borne Viral Diseases management and control actions. However, the model's forecast reliability and biological realism are limited by the quantity and quality of the life-history traits observations used to inform the population dynamic model. This information is collected throughout laboratory experiments trying to assess the influence of temperature on different life-history traits (e.g., temperature-dependent adult mortality rate). Nevertheless, the results have been so far highly variable, due to i) different experimental settings and ii) multiple geographic origin of the biological specimens.
IFTAMED aims to review the current knowledge on the influence of temperature on the life-history traits of Ae. albopictus and Ae. koreicus, two invasive Aedes species of medical interest with established populations in North-East Italy, and implement it by designing targeted laboratory experiments under fluctuating temperature regimes, a laboratory setting that more accurately reflect variable environmental conditions in the field but not frequently applied in mosquito thermal biology experiments. The information collected from the review and the laboratory experiments will be disseminated in open-access databases and used to inform a population-dynamic mechanistic model, whose spatial and temporal forecasts will be integrated into an online early-warning system displaying information of practical interest (e.g, the estimated abundance of each life stage) for proactive mosquito control and management actions.
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