Johannah E Farner, Meghan Howard, Jeffrey R Smith, Christopher B Anderson, Erin A Mordecai
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Context: Land use change and deforestation drive both biodiversity loss and zoonotic disease transmission in tropical countrysides. For mosquito communities that can include disease vectors, forest loss has been linked to reduced biodiversity and increased vector presence. The spatial scales at which land use and tree cover shape mosquito communities present a knowledge gap relevant to both biodiversity and public health.
Objectives: We investigated the responses of mosquito species richness and Aedes albopictus disease vector presence to land use and to tree cover surrounding survey sites at different spatial scales. We also investigated species compositional turnover across land uses and along environmental gradients.
Methods: We paired a field survey of mosquito communities in agricultural, residential, and forested lands in rural southern Costa Rica with remotely sensed tree cover data. We compared mosquito richness and vector presence responses to tree cover measured across scales from 30 to 1000 m, and across land uses. We analyzed mosquito community compositional turnover between land uses and along environmental gradients of tree cover, temperature, elevation, and geographic distance.
Results: Tree cover was both positively correlated with mosquito species richness and negatively correlated with the presence of the common invasive dengue vector Ae. albopictus at small spatial scales of 90-250 m. Land use predicted community composition and Ae. albopictus presence.
Conclusions: The results suggest that local tree cover preservation and expansion can support mosquito species richness and reduce disease vector presence. The identified spatial range at which tree cover shapes mosquito communities can inform the development of land management practices to protect both ecosystem and public health.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-025-02105-0.
期刊介绍：
Landscape Ecology is the flagship journal of a well-established and rapidly developing interdisciplinary science that focuses explicitly on the ecological understanding of spatial heterogeneity. Landscape Ecology draws together expertise from both biophysical and socioeconomic sciences to explore basic and applied research questions concerning the ecology, conservation, management, design/planning, and sustainability of landscapes as coupled human-environment systems. Landscape ecology studies are characterized by spatially explicit methods in which spatial attributes and arrangements of landscape elements are directly analyzed and related to ecological processes.
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