First record of Aedes japonicus japonicus in Illinois: defining its spatial distribution and associated mosquito species.

Since the initial discovery of Aedes japonicus japonicus in 1998 from sites in the northeastern United States (New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey), this invasive mosquito species now permeates local faunas throughout eastern North America and continues to expand its distribution westward. In July and August of 2006, the 1st reported specimens of Ae. japonicus were detected in east central Illinois at 2 woodlots in southern Urbana.

Remote and field level quantification of vegetation covariates for malaria mapping in three rice agro-village complexes in Central Kenya.

Background: We examined algorithms for malaria mapping using the impact of reflectance calibration uncertainties on the accuracies of three vegetation indices (VI)'s derived from QuickBird data in three rice agro-village complexes Mwea, Kenya. We also generated inferential statistics from field sampled vegetation covariates for identifying riceland Anopheles arabiensis during the crop season. All aquatic habitats in the study sites were stratified based on levels of rice stages; flooded, land preparation, post-transplanting, tillering, flowering/maturation and post-harvest/fallow.

Environmental abundance of Anopheles (Diptera: Culicidae) larval habitats on land cover change sites in Karima Village, Mwea Rice Scheme, Kenya.

A study was carried out at Karima Village in the Mwea Rice Irrigation Scheme in Kenya to assess the impact of rice husbandry and associated land cover change for mosquito larval abundance. A multi-temporal, land use land cover (LULC) classification dataset incorporating distributions of Anopheles arabiensis aquatic larval habitats was produced in ERDAS Imagine version 8.7 using combined images from IKONOS at 4m spatial resolution from 2005 and Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)trade mark classification data at 30-meters spatial resolution from 1988 for Karima.

A grid-based infrastructure for ecological forecasting of rice land Anopheles arabiensis aquatic larval habitats.

Background: For remote identification of mosquito habitats the first step is often to construct a discrete tessellation of the region. In applications where complex geometries do not need to be represented such as urban habitats, regular orthogonal grids are constructed in GIS and overlaid on satellite images. However, rice land vector mosquito aquatic habitats are rarely uniform in space or character.

Spatially targeting Culex quinquefasciatus aquatic habitats on modified land cover for implementing an Integrated Vector Management (IVM) program in three villages within the Mwea Rice Scheme, Kenya.

Background: Continuous land cover modification is an important part of spatial epidemiology because it can help identify environmental factors and Culex mosquitoes associated with arbovirus transmission and thus guide control intervention. The aim of this study was to determine whether remotely sensed data could be used to identify rice-related Culex quinquefasciatus breeding habitats in three rice-villages within the Mwea Rice Scheme, Kenya. We examined whether a land use land cover (LULC) classification based on two scenes, IKONOS at 4 m and Landsat Thematic Mapper at 30 m could be used to map different land uses and rice planted at different times (cohorts), and to infer which LULC change were correlated to high density Cx.