Composition of mosquito species in a Mediterranean wetland – modeling the effects of interactions and abiotic parameters
2 Institut de Recherche pour le Développement: Marseille, France.
3 Servicio de Control de Mosquitos de la Diputación de Huelva, Huelva, Spain
4 Estación Biológica de Doñana – CSIC, Sevilla, Spain
P 1.23 in Poster Session Thursday (15:15-16:00)
Recent outbreaks of West Nile virus have been reported from southern Spain, a region with important wetland habitats for migratory birds. Here, we disentangle the role of biotic interactions and abiotic parameters affecting the community composition of the mosquito species in the Doñana National Park, Spain.
We applied Joint Species Distribution Models (JSDM), using the Hierarchical Modeling of Species Communities (HMSC) approach to simultaneously model the effect of habitat types, normalized difference vegetation index, hydroperiod, distance to rivers, land-surface temperature, and the abundance of seven mosquito species. We created three models with varied parameters and evaluated the effect of the listed abiotic parameters and species-to-species associations, which serve as proxies for species interactions.
Our models estimated the species-specific response of the mosquito community to abiotic parameters. The result identified a positive association within the Culex community with potential biotic interactions. However, Ochlerotatus caspius, Ochlerotatus detritus, and Anopheles atroparvus have no statistically supported association with each other and with the Culex species after accounting for the effect of abiotic parameters.
The JSDM approach supports the identification of potential biotic interactions and allows the spatial projection of the abundance of each mosquito species, an important parameter for epidemiological models.