Wing Morphometrics of Mosquitoes from North-Eastern France.

Background: In the context of the increasing circulation of arboviruses, a simple, fast and reliable identification method for mosquitoes is needed. Geometric morphometrics have proven useful for mosquito classification and have been used around the world on known vectors such as . Morphometrics applied on French indigenous mosquitoes would prove useful in the case of autochthonous outbreaks of arboviral diseases.

Methods: We applied geometric morphometric analysis on six indigenous and invasive species of the genus in order to evaluate its efficiency for mosquito classification.

Results: Six species of mosquitoes (, , , , and ) were successfully differentiated with Canonical Variate Analysis of the Procrustes dataset of superimposed coordinates of 18 wing landmarks.

Conclusions: Geometric morphometrics are effective tools for the rapid, inexpensive and reliable classification of at least six species of the genus in France.