| Sumario: |
Patterns of mosquito spatial persistence and temporal presence, as well as synchrony, i.e., the degree of
concerted fluctuations in abundance, have been scarcely studied at finely grained spatial scales and over
altitudinal gradients. Here, we present a spatial persistence, temporal presence, and synchrony analysis of four
common mosquito species across the altitudinal gradient of Mt. Konpira in Nagasaki, Japan. We found that
Aedes albopictus (Skuse) was more frequently found at the mountain base. In contrast, Aedes japonicus
(Theobald) and Aedes flavopictus Yamada were common higher in the mountain, while Armigeres subalbatus
(Coquillet) was uniformly present across the mountain, yet less frequently than the other species during the
studied period. Our analysis showed that these spatial heterogeneities were associated with differences in land scape and microclimatic elements of Mt. Konpira. Temporally we found that presence across sampling loca tions was mainly synchronous across the four species and positively associated with rainfall and temperature.
With the exception of Ae albopictus, where no significant synchrony was observed, mosquito species mainly
showed flat synchrony profiles in Mt. Konpira when looking at the geographic (2-D) distance between their sam pling locations. By contrast, when synchrony was studied across altitude, it was observed that Ae. flavopictus
tracked the temperature synchrony pattern, decreasing its synchrony with the separation in altitude between
sampling locations. Finally, our results suggest that differences in mosquito species persistence, temporal pres ence, and synchrony might be useful to understand the entomological risk of vector-borne disease transmission
in urban landscapes.
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