Potential distribution of invasive tiger mosquitos

Due to their potential role in pathogen transmission, invasive mosquitoes pose considerable threats to human and animal health. Researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, the University of Pécs, and the ELTE evaluated the effect of environmental factors reflecting climate, habitat type, food supply, traffic, and interspecific competition on the distribution of three invasive tiger mosquito species in Hungary. They trained species distribution models using citizen science observations and then predicted the potential distribution of the species. The research, which was published by the D1-ranked scientific journal ‘Journal of Pest Science’, was led by László Zsolt Garamszegi. The last author of the publication is Ákos Bede-Fazekas, assistant professor in our department. The researchers uncovered species-specific patterns and found that different predictor sets were selected for the three different species, however, only predictions for Asian tiger mosquito could be validated with direct trapping data. They concluded that citizen science informed distribution maps can be used to identify environmental predictors that determine the spread of invasive mosquitoes.