Abstract
Worldwide, cities are investing in greenspace to enhance urban quality of life and conserve biodiversity. Cities should ensure these investments do not unintentionally result in ecosystem disservices. Municipal management decisions regarding urban greenspaces, such as mowing frequency, could influence mosquito communities and public health. We examined how mowing, resultant vegetation characteristics, and landscape context influenced adult mosquito abundance in urban vacant lots. We sampled adult Culex and Aedes mosquitoes in a network of vacant lots within eight Cleveland, Ohio, USA neighborhoods in 2015 and 2016 using CO2-baited light traps and grass-infused gravid traps. For each lot, we quantified vegetation characteristics, including plant diversity, bloom area, and biomass, as well as the surrounding landscape composition at radii of 60 and 1000 m. We found that periodic mowing did not significantly affect mosquito abundances. However, vacant lots with more diverse plant communities were associated with a greater light trap capture of both Culex and Aedes. Both mosquito genera declined in light trap catches with increased impervious surface at 60 m. Similarly, Culex (gravid trap) declined with the amount of built infrastructure at 1000 m. In contrast, Aedes (light trap) increased with the concentration of buildings in the landscape at 1000 m. Our findings indicate that reducing the frequency of mowing within vacant lots will not necessarily increase adult mosquito abundance. Nonetheless, mosquito surveillance and management should be considered when planning conservation-focused greenspaces, as vegetation design choices and the landscape context of a site do influence vector abundance and potentially disease risk.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Richard Gary and the Ohio Department of Health for sharing their expertise on mosquito trapping and species identification, providing mosquito traps, and performing the molecular detection of West Nile virus in field-collected Culex spp. mosquitoes. We thank Dan Meaney, GISP (Cuyahoga County Planning Commission) for providing land cover raw data, and Emily Trejo Sypolt for ArcGIS help in creating Fig. 1. We thank Dr. Frances Sivakoff and Yvan Delgado de la Flor for providing inputs on statistical analyses, and Yvan Delgado de la Flor and Denisha Parker for assisting vegetation collection and data entry. We also thank the Cuyahoga County Board of Health for providing mosquito trapping equipment. The research was funded in part by Ohio Environmental Protection Agency Mosquito Control Grant SFY 2016, NSF CAREER 1253197 grant, and NSF DGE-1343012 fellowship.
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Yang, L., Turo, K.J., Riley, C.B. et al. Can urban greening increase vector abundance in cities? The impact of mowing, local vegetation, and landscape composition on adult mosquito populations. Urban Ecosyst 22, 827–839 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-019-00857-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-019-00857-7