Mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) in Madre de Dios Department, Peru, with distributional assessment using ecological niche modeling

One of the most serious mosquito-borne diseases in the New World is yellow fever. This disease has reemerged in South America in recent years, including Peru, Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. This emergence is apparently due in part to decreased investment in mosquito control as well as to human population movements, deforestation, and climate change. While biologists have paid extensive attention to other insect groups, knowledge of Peru's mosquito diversity remains poor. My study generally consists of two parts. The first portion of the study aims to assess the mosquito diversity - with an eye towards vector species - in the Madre de Dios Department, Peru, an area where knowledge of mosquito diversity appears to be particularly lacking, which will be carried out at the Los Amigos Biological Station (CICRA). The second portion is to incorporate the dataset gathered into a larger, continent-wide ecological niche modeling study to map range-wide distributions of yellow fever vector mosquito species for an assessment of how changing climate will affect their distributions and associated risk of yellow fever transmission. The assessment of mosquito species in poorly-sampled areas, like Madre de Dios, and characterization of their habitats and potential shifts is of clear public health importance to both these regions as well as to the greater Amazon Basin.