Abstract
Rats are abundant and ubiquitous in urban environments. There has been increasing attention to the need for evidence-based, integrated rat management and surveillance approaches because rats can compromise public health and impose economic costs. Yet there are few studies that characterize rat distributions in sewers and there are no studies that incorporate the complexity of sewer networks that encompass multiple sewer lines, all comprised of their own unique characteristics. To address this knowledge gap, this study identifies sewer characteristics that are associated with rat presence in the city of Seattle’s urban sewer system. We obtained sewer baiting data from 1752 geotagged manholes to monitor rat presence and constructed generalized additive models to account for spatial autocorrelation. Sewer rats were unevenly distributed across sampled manholes with clusters of higher rat presence at upper elevations, within sanitary pipes, narrower pipes, pipes at a shallower depth, and older pipes. These findings are important because identifying features of urban sewers that promote rat presence may allow municipalities to target areas for rat control activities and sewer maintenance. These findings suggest the need to evaluate additional characteristics of the surface environment and identify the factors driving rat movement within sewers, across the surface, and between the surface and the sewers.
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Cleaned data is available on Dryad (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mw6m90603).
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Codes are available on Dryad (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mw6m90603).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the sewer baiting program crew at the Seattle & King County Public Health’s Environmental Health Services Division for conducting sewer baiting at the sampled manholes, collecting the bait consumption data, and recording geotagged data in ArcGIS Pro.
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The study was supported by Canadian Agricultural Partnership.
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XG, ML, KB, and CH contributed to the conception and design of this study. Sample collection was coordinated by LH. Data analyses were performed by XG, ML, KB, and CH. The first draft of the manuscript was written by XG. All authors contributed to revising the manuscript and approved the final manuscript for submission. Funding was acquired by CH.
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Guo, X., Lee, M.J., Byers, K.A. et al. Characteristics of the urban sewer system and rat presence in Seattle. Urban Ecosyst 25, 1699–1709 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-022-01255-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-022-01255-2