Predicting Culex pipiens/restuans population dynamics using a weather driven dynamic compartmental population model

Abstract

Abstract Background: Mosquitoes of the genus Culex are important vectors of a variety of arthropod born viral infections. In most of the northern parts of the U.S.A. Cx. pipiens/restuans is the predominant representative of this genus. As vectors, they play a key role in the spreading of arboviruses and thus knowledge of the population dynamic of mosquitos is important to understand the disease ecology of these viruses. As poikilotherm animals, the vital rates of mosquitoes are highly dependent on ambient temperature, and also on precipitation. Methods: We present a compartmental model for the population dynamics of Cx. pipiens/restuans. The model is driven by temperature, precipitation and daytime length (which can be calculated from the geographic latitude). For model evaluation we used long term mosquito capture data, which were averaged from multiple sites in Cook County, Illinois. Results: The model fitted the observation data (Spearman’s rs=0.899) and was able to reproduce between year differences in the abundance of the Cx. pipiens/restuans mosquitoes as well as the different seasonal trends. Using this model, we evaluated the effectiveness of targeting different vital rates for mosquito control strategies. Conclusions:The final model is able to reproduce the weekly mean Cx. pipiens/restuans abundance for Cook County with high accuracy and over a long time period of 20 years. As only operational accessible input parameters were used, the presented model could be simply integrated in epidemiological compartmental models such as susceptible, infectious, and/or recovered (SIR) models of Culex-borne infectious diseases.