engleski

Modelling for reduced insecticide use in mosquito population control

Due to climate change, mosquito control and related environmental pollution are expected to intensify [1]. The aim of this research was to explore performance of larvicidal, adulticidal, and combined treatments using a validated matrix mosquito population model [2] and historical environmental data for the city of Osijek. A total of 33 treatment strategies have been considered, with varying number of consecutive treatment-days, pause-days and different number of treatment pattern repeats. According to the simulation results, depending on treatment timing, larvicidal treatments can significantly reduce the mosquito population, or have extremely negative outcomes that increase overall mosquito population. On the other hand, the outcomes of combined larvicidal and adulticidal treatments depend much less on timing, and therefore give the greatest chance of a positive outcome if environmental conditions are not known or could not be predicted. Based on the results, we argue for adaptive mosquito population control, in which mosquito population models driven by weather forecast data are used for optimizing the implementation of mosquito population control measures.

computer simulations ; adulticides ; larvicides ; combined treatments

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