Abstract
Environmental contamination due to pest control in general, and mosquito control in particular, is an important issue expected to increase with climate change. We use a validated model for population dynamics of mosquitoes and historical environmental data to explore performance of larvicidal, adulticidal, and combined treatments. Results show that depending on treatment timing, larvicidal treatments can induce very good results, or have negative outcomes that increase overall mosquito population. Combined larvicidal and adulticidal treatments, however, exhibit much lesser dependence on timing, and therefore give the greatest chance of positive outcomes if environmental conditions are not known. Based on the results, we argue for adaptive mosquito management, in which weather data and forecasts are used to drive a model that identifies best intervals for insecticide use. Such an approach can have considerably better results than static, calendar-driven management and, therefore, considerably reduce environmental contamination. Adaptive management could consider larvicidal treatment because it gives good results if the timing is correct. Static management should, however, combine larvicidal and adulticidal treatments for the greatest chance of success.
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Funding
This work was conducted within the CADAPT project (Adaptation of mosquito population control measures to climate change in Croatia) funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund under the contract number: KK.05.1.1.02.0008. Hardware donated by NVIDIA Applied Research Accelerator Program was used in this research. The first author has been supported by the Young Scientist Career Development grant of the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-DOK-2021-02-3492).
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Conceptualization: BKH, TD, DKH; Methodology: BKH, TD, DKH, TK; Formal analysis and investigation: TD, DKH; Visualization: TD; Writing–original draft: TD, TK, DKH, BKH; Writing–review & editing: TD, BKH; Supervision: BKH; Funding acquisition: BKH.
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Djerdj, T., Hackenberger, D.K., Klanjšček, T. et al. Modelling can reduce contamination from mosquito population control. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 37, 1007–1019 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-022-02326-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-022-02326-8