Stormwater & Mosquito Control Project

Information from the Stormwater & Mosquito Control Project’s research results, funded by a National Science Foundation grant led by the University of Maine, has led to a new informational video on tourism and diseases.

According to the Maine website, “Focusing on the Americas, this NSF-funded research project examines the relationships among the spread of mosquito-transmitted diseases, perceptions of disease risk, and human travel. The movement of infected humans has the potential to spark global epidemics of poorly-known mosquito-borne diseases, similar to those that occurred in the Americas following the first detection of chikungunya and Zika viruses in 2013 and 2015, respectively.”

The video:

View the Spanish language version here >>>

Green infrastructure is an engineering innovation designed to intercept stormwater on-site. Unlike traditional catch basins, green infrastructure designs have permeable bottoms that allow the water to filter back into the soil.

Brian Allan and the Stormwater & Mosquito Control team saw this existing sustainable solution as an opportunity to study how it might prevent mosquito growth — a potential “win-win” scenario. His team decided to investigate locations where green infrastructure was implemented to see if habitats for mosquito development decreased. Additionally, they were curious about the composition of the aquatic microbiome and how this impacted mosquito growth.

The team has found that leaves from non-native plants, like bush honeysuckle, a common invasive species in eastern North America, were ideal for mosquito development. However, blackberry, a native species, had the opposite effect. Blackberry leaves created what is known as an “ecological trap.” Female mosquitoes expect that aquatic habitats containing blackberry leaves have optimal conditions for their larvae’s growth, but when they lay eggs in these habitats, the microbial growth there is detrimental to larval survival.

“It looked to be an organic form of mosquito control,” Allan said; blackberry leaves appear to be just as effective as larvicides.

Thus, the sustainability of green infrastructure and the mosquito control component are parallel functions.

Read the full feature article by iSEE Communications Intern Anjali Yedavalli >>>

Composition of bacterial communities in mosquito and water samples collected from individual sampling sites at Trelease Woods and South Farms in Urbana, Ill.

Principal Investigator Brian Allan reports the following successes in the sixth year of this iSEE-funded project (which has been extended with two major National Science Foundation awards and a U.S. Geological Survey grant since the initial seed funding):

• “The previous year for our iSEE-funded research theme has been highly productive in several major areas. We continue to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of spread of Zika virus in the Americas and apply this to other disease outbreaks (e.g. COVID-19).”
• Recent accomplishments include development of a new method to model the transmission of infectious diseases based on human mobility networks (Lieberthal et al. 2020; see publication below) and to understand how mobility interacts with other epidemiological parameters to determine superspreader events (Lieberthal and Gardner 2021; see publication below).
• “We are applying these mathematical findings to understanding the spread of Zika using high-resolution epidemiological data from Columbia and Guatemala.”
• Additionally, several of the team’s field-based projects into the effects of stormwater management practices on mosquito-borne disease risk have continued, and team members have published multiple recent research papers led by Elijah Juma on environmental factors that influence the assembly of the mosquito microbiome (Juma et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2021; see publication below).
• “With the assistance of iSEE funding, we also recently completed a related analysis on the spread of Lyme disease in the Midwestern U.S., garnering a high profile publication that received considerable media attention (Gardner et al. 2020; see publication below).”

University of Illinois Associate Professor of Entomology Brian Allan and former Illinois Postdoc Allison Gardner, now a Principal Investigator and faculty member at the University of Maine, have developed a model to predict the spread of black-legged ticks — and the resulting spread of Lyme disease — in the Midwest.

The researchers used data from historical studies of black-legged or deer ticks — along with an analysis of county-level landscape features associated with their spread — to build a model that can predict where ticks are likely to appear in future years. They observed “a wavelike pattern of spread, where counties that get invaded with black-legged ticks tend to be adjacent to a county that has already been invaded,” Allan said. “And in some Midwestern states, we see that areas adjacent to major rivers are invaded in sequence. In Illinois, for example, the ticks first arrived along the Illinois River and then spread up and down the river quite quickly.”

The study was published in December 2020 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Read the full news release from the U of I News Bureau >>>

Principal Investigator Brian Allan reports the following successes in the fifth year of this iSEE-funded project (which has been extended with two major National Science Foundation awards since the initial seed funding):         

• 

  M.S. Candidate Cameron Schwing in the lab.

  The team continues to develop a research program using “social sensing” (i.e., the use of geo-located social media activity data) to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of spread of Zika virus in the Americas and apply this to future outbreaks. “Early accomplishments from our research include development of a new method to model the transmission of infectious diseases based on human mobility networks, led by Brandon Lieberthal, and the application of this to understanding the spread of Zika using high-resolution epidemiological data from Columbia and Guatemala, led by Allison Gardner (please see Presentations below).”
• Additionally, several field-based projects into the effects of stormwater management practices on mosquito-borne disease risk have continued, and the team recently published research papers led by Chris Holmes on the ecological factors that structure mosquito communities in stormwater ponds, and by Allison Parker on the effects of container size on oviposition choice in female mosquitoes (please see Publications below).
• “Finally, our findings to date have motivated several additional field and laboratory studies, including surveys of green and conventional stormwater infrastructure in Illinois to explore the consequences of the adoption of green technologies for mosquito control, and the impact of the stormwater environment on the assembly of the mosquito microbiome. We recently published research led by Elijah Juma showing that stormwater habitats impact the assembly of the mosquito microbiome (please see Publications below). These additional efforts contributed to the recently completed Ph.D. research of several graduate students affiliated with our project, including Chris Holmes, Elijah Juma, and Allison Parker.”
• In addition, members of the team helped contribute to iSEE’s 2019 Critical Conversation on genetically modified mosquitoes. The resulting oped piece by Allan, fellow U of I researchers from the Illinois Natural History Survey, and other Conversation participants was published in June 2020 in The Conversation (please see Publications below). Read more >>>

Principal Investigator Brian Allan reports that the fourth year for this iSEE-funded project “has been highly productive in several major areas:”          

• The team continues to develop a research program using “social sensing” (i.e., the use of geo-located social media activity data) to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of spread of Zika virus in the Americas and apply this to future outbreaks. “Early accomplishments from our research include a new quantitative method for estimating the shift from travel-associated to local transmission of Zika virus, and the application of this to understanding the spread of Zika through a network model using high-resolution epidemiological data from Columbia,” Allan said.

• Additionally, several of the team’s field-based projects into the effects of stormwater management practices on mosquito-borne disease risk have matured, and and it recently published research papers led by Allison Gardner on the use of native vegetation as an ecological trap for mosquito control and by Allison Parker on competition between mosquito species in container environments, as well as on the potential effects of gutter guards (please see publications list below).

• “Finally, our findings to date have motivated several additional field and laboratory studies, including surveys of green and conventional stormwater infrastructure here in Illinois to explore the consequences of the adoption of green technologies for mosquito control and the impact of the stormwater environment on the assembly of the mosquito microbiome,” Allan said. The additional efforts stem in part from the M.S. and Ph.D. research of several graduate students affiliated with the SMC project, including Chris Holmes, Elijah Juma, Allison Parker and Cameron Schwing.

• In addition, Co-PI Carla Cáceres, a Professor of Animal Biology, continues leading her National Science Foundation-funded study titled “Community Assembly across Scales of Spatial Organization.” The $800,000 project, which includes several Stormwater and Mosquito Control team members, is studying potential feedback loops between the food web mosquito larvae are born into and the chemistry of their guts.

• And Allan helped lead iSEE’s Critical Conversation on genetically modified mosquitoes, a controversial topic on many levels. The Critical Conversation will produce a paper on potential stakeholder agreements as well as a op-ed piece in a national publication, and Allan will be one of the lead authors.

The answer to mitigating mosquito growth might lie in the flower pots and rain barrels in our own backyards.

The mosquitoes that carry Zika virus prefer breeding in human-made, artificial containers, and a recent study published by members of iSEE’s Stormwater and Mosquito Control team in the Journal of Medical Entomology discovered that container size does matter. Competition within these container habitats between two mosquito species, Aedes aegypti L. (yellow fever mosquito) and Aedes albopictus (Asian tiger mosquito), known for their global span and spread of disease, were analyzed. The study measured and controlled for a range of container sizes, food levels, and resulting resource competition.

The study shows that smaller containers were more successful habitats for both types of mosquitoes. Large containers yielded significantly lower numbers of adult mosquitoes due to stronger competition over resources. Additionally, the size of the container influenced the strength of different types of competition — whether the mosquitoes were competing for resources more within their own species or between the two species.

“Understanding how container size may affect the distribution and abundance of Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus is not only of fundamental ecological interest, but also may have implications for human health,” the study concluded.

The project team includes Allison T. Parker, a University of Illinois Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Entomology, Allison M. Gardner, Assistant Professor of Arthropod Vector Biology at the University of Maine (and a former Ph.D. Candidate at Illinois), Manuel Perez, undergraduate student in Illinois’ School of Integrative Biology, Brian F. Allan, Illinois Associate Professor of Entomology, and Ephantus J. Muturi, Research Entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Read the full paper >>>

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois and beyond is taking an “attract and kill” approach to curbing mosquito populations — and the resulting diseases associated with the pests.

In a series of experiments, members of the Stormwater and Mosquito Control team found that manipulating leaf litter — particularly decomposing common blackberry leaves — is particularly effective in attracting mosquitoes to lay their eggs in urban stormwater catch basins. But the resulting chemical combination in the water is an “ecological trap”: After the eggs hatch, the juvenile mosquitoes have a low survival rate in that habitat. Thus, mosquito populations that carry the West Nile virus and other vector-borne diseases might be curbed.

The researchers outlined their findings in a November 2018 publication in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The study was led by Allison Gardner, a University of Illinois Ph.D. graduate and now an Assistant Professor of Arthropod Vector Biology at the University of Maine; Ephantus J. Muturi,  former Director of Medical Entomology at the Illinois Natural History Survey and now a Research Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Brian Allan, Associate Professor of Entomology at Illinois and the PI for the Stormwater and Mosquito Control team.

“Our findings provide new insights into potential mechanistic pathways by which ecological traps may occur in nature and proof-of-concept for a new ‘attract-and-kill’ tool for mosquito control,” they wrote.

Read the University of Maine news release at phys.org >>>

Read the full paper >>>

Social media is used to track your purchases, national sporting events, and local news … but what about viruses?

Members of the iSEE-supported Stormwater and Mosquito Control project team were recently awarded a portion of a $1,576,788 grant by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology over five years to study just that.

Wang

Allan

Gardner

The project team, led by Allison Gardner, Assistant Professor of Arthropod Vector Biology at the University of Maine, includes University of Illinois researchers Brian Allan, Associate Professor of Entomology, and Shaowen Wang, Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science. The Illinois team will receive $495,139 of the total award. Gardner, incidentally, received her Ph.D. in Entomology at Illinois and served as a member of the Stormwater and Mosquito Control project team before moving on to Maine.

Through the “Coupled Dynamics of Tourism and Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission in the Americas” study, the team will use a research program they developed that uses “social sensing” to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of the spread of the Zika virus. The patterns found can be applied to future outbreaks.

Early accomplishments on this project include discovering a new quantitative method for estimating the shift from travel associated with local transmission of Zika virus, and the application of this to understanding the spread of Zika through a network model using high-resolution epidemiological data from Columbia.

This study expands on the extensive research the iSEE Stormwater and Mosquito project has been working on, including two recent publications on invasive vegetation and green infrastructure modeling.

Principal Investigator Brian Allan reports on the third year for this iSEE-funded project:

• “We have made substantial progress in an ambitious project to forecast for the continental U.S. what will be the extent of the adoption of green stormwater infrastructure and what likely will be the impact of the widespread adoption of green infrastructural practices for mosquito control. As part of this effort we have created a novel quantitative method for estimating variation in runoff due to stormwater practices, an analytical approach we refer to as a ‘composite curve number’, which will greatly alleviate the data burden for estimation of stormwater runoff volume. We have prepared a manuscript from this undertaking that is close to submission.”
• Additionally, the team developed a novel method for estimating the distribution of “built up” area in urban ecosystems using remotely sensed data, and the manuscript describing this new method was recently accepted for publication (see article in previous tab).
• Stormwater and Mosquito Control team members have started a research program using “social sensing” (i.e., the use of geo-located social media activity data) to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of spread of Zika virus in the Americas and apply this to future outbreaks. Early accomplishments from the team’s research include a new quantitative method for estimating the shift from travel-associated to local transmission of Zika virus, and the application of this to understanding the spread of Zika through a network model using high-resolution epidemiological data from Columbia.
• “Several of our field-based projects into the effects of stormwater management practices on mosquito-borne disease risk have matured, and we have recently submitted a manuscript from research led by Allison Gardner on the use of native vegetation as an ecological trap for mosquito control.”
• The team is close to submission for one of the most important manuscripts from research led by Andrew Mackay into the effects of green stormwater infrastructure on mosquito populations from a study performed in Aurora, Ill.
• “Finally, our findings to date have motivated several additional field and laboratory studies, including surveys of green and conventional stormwater infrastructure here in Illinois to explore the consequences of the adoption of green technologies for mosquito control and the impact of the stormwater environment on the assembly of the mosquito microbiome. These additional efforts in part form the Ph.D. research of several graduate students affiliated with our project, including Elijah Juma, Chris Holmes, and Allison Parker, the latter of whom has submitted the first manuscript from her research.”

Cáceres

You’ve heard that “you are what you eat.” But could what you are in return influence what’s available to eat?

Animal Biology Professor Carla Cáceres, a Co-PI on iSEE’s Stormwater and Mosquito Control project, will receive $800,000 over three years from the National Science Foundation to study potential feedback loops between the food web mosquito larvae are born into and the chemistry of their gut.

Through the “Community Assembly Across Scales of Ecological Organization” study, her goal is to better understand the mechanics of the relationships between invertebrate hosts (such as mosquitoes) and their microbes in natural systems.

The project will focus on two questions:

1. Is the assembly of a common grazer’s gut microbiota driven by the corresponding assembly of the invertebrate food web?
2. Do microbiome-driven differences in the growth rate of community members influence invertebrate community assembly?

Cáceres will collaborate with several Illinois researchers and outside partners, including Stormwater and Mosquito Control PI Brian Allan, an Associate Professor of Entomology; Allison Hansen, an Assistant Professor of Entomology; Ephantus Muturi, a Research Entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Zoi Rapti, an Associate Professor of Mathematics.

Removing invasive honeysuckle from forested areas may lead to fewer mosquitoes in your neighborhood — including the kind that spread West Nile Virus — according to a paper in the August 2017 edition of EcoHealth by PI Brian Allan and members of of his project team.

During a two-year study in two separate forest fragments in residential neighborhoods in nearby Mahomet, Ill., team members collected more than 30,000 mosquitoes before and after a planned large-scale removal of Amur honeysuckle plants.

The researchers found that clearing the invasive species from the natural ecosystem reduces the abundance of both disease-transmitting and nondisease-transmitting mosquitoes that are known to bite humans.

While more investigation is needed to pinpoint biological processes at play for this reduction in mosquito abundance, the team can shed light on a few dynamics:

First, the removal of honeysuckle coincided with reductions in the number and variety of birds in the forested spaces. Without as many birds to provide blood meals to young mosquitoes, many do not survive to bite human hosts. Second, the honeysuckle supports a local, high-moisture microclimate beneficial to mosquitos’ health. Once removed, fewer mosquitoes seemed to live long enough in their lifecycle to become disease carriers.

The paper was published by Allan; former Entomology Ph.D. student Allison Gardner, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine; team member Juma Muturi, former Director of Medical Entomology at the Illinois Natural History Survey and now Research Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Leah D. Overmier, an Entomology student.

The authors wrote: “These results add to a growing body of literature which suggests that the ecosystem services provided by native plants — and the benefits of management of invasive species—may extend beyond oft-considered factors such as nutrient cycling, prevention of stream erosion, air filtration, and preservation of wildlife diversity to include direct ramifications for entomological risk of exposure to vector-borne pathogens.”

Read the full article in EcoHealth >>>

Principal Investigator Brian Allan reports that the second year for this iSEE-funded project has been highly productive in several major areas.

• “We have successfully integrated the mosquito control, hydrological modeling, and cyberGIS experts on our team in an ambitious project to forecast for the continental U.S. what will be the extent of the adoption of green stormwater infrastructure and what likely will be the impact of the widespread adoption of green infrastructural practices for mosquito control,” Allan said. The team has solved a number of challenges related to this task, including:
  • the assembly of several very large data sets using “big data” approaches; and
  • the development of novel quantitative methods for estimating variation in runoff due to stormwater practices.
• Stormwater and Mosquito Control team members are preparing their first publication from this large-scale undertaking.
• The arrival of Zika virus in the Americas created research opportunities directly relevant to the efforts of this research theme. “We have started a research program using ‘social sensing’ (i.e., the use of geo-located social media activity data) to model networks of human movements and contacts to recreate the pattern of spread of Zika virus in the Americas and apply this to future outbreaks,” Allan said.
• The research findings to date have motivated several additional field and laboratory studies, including surveys of green and conventional stormwater infrastructure in Illinois to explore the consequences of the adoption of green technologies for mosquito control and the impact of the stormwater environment on the assembly of the mosquito microbiome. “These additional efforts in part form the Ph.D. research of several graduate students affiliated with our project, including Elijah Juma, Chris Holmes, and Allison Parker,” Allan said.

The previous year has generated a tremendous amount of activity. According to Allan, three major areas of progress stand out:

1. “Our primary area of activity has been to unite the mosquito control, hydrological modeling, and cyberGIS experts on our team in an ambitious project to forecast for the continental U.S. a) what will be the extent of the adoption of green stormwater infrastructure based on state and municipal regulations combined with local hydrology and soil characteristics, and b) what is the likely impact of the widespread adoption of green infrastructural practices for mosquito control based on the known biology of local vector mosquito species.”
2. The arrival of Zika virus in the Americas has created several funding opportunities directly relevant to the efforts of this project, including a synthesis of the team’s empirical research into the stormwater environment and employing cyberGIS to use large data sets and project forecasts of disease risk and movements across landscapes.
3. “Our findings to date have motivated several additional field and laboratory studies, including surveys of green and conventional stormwater infrastructure here in Illinois to better understand the consequences of the adoption of green technologies for mosquito control.”

A view of Baltimore, one of 12 urban communities whose building coverage datasets were used in the study.

Planning out green infrastructure — including stormwater management projects — would improve with more precise digital mapping according to a paper published in Computers, Environment, and Urban Systems in June 2018 by PI Brian Allan and other members of his team.

Current mapping systems do not accurately account for building coverage (the actual land area covered by a building structure) without including parking lots, roads, pavement, etc. Allan’s team set out to find and develop a more accurate model of building coverage. Using data from 12 different urban communities, the team developed the first estimates in modeling building coverage throughout the U.S.

By understanding actual building coverage, city planners and policy makers will have better tools to implement sustainable practices (such as solar energy, green roofs, and rainwater collection) in their communities.

The paper was published by Allan, an Associate Professor of Entomology at Illinois, and other Stormwater and Mosquito Control team members: Aiman Soliman, an Entomology Research Associate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; Andrew Mackay, Associate Scientist/Vector Ecologist in the Illinois Natural History Survey; Arthur Schmidt, Research Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Shaowen Wang, Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science. It documents part of their ongoing efforts to understand how the adoption of green infrastructure for stormwater management may impact mosquito-borne disease risk.

The authors wrote: “The current model provides a first step to mapping the geographic distribution of building coverage for the contiguous U.S., but future work could expand the capabilities and accuracy of the current model. We expect that the output dataset will support the effort to evaluate green infrastructure projects, especially at the national scale. Some promising applications include estimating the potential for rainwater harvesting and solar energy collection, in addition to different environmental studies that investigate the relationships between urban physical infrastructure and local climate (e.g. urban heat effect), etc., which could be an invaluable resource for assessments of the potential for certain urban sustainability practices (e.g. green roofs, solar energy harvesters).”

Read the full article >>>