Community Composition
Mosquitoes can be highly specialised towards particular habitats, especially wetlands during their aquatic life history stages.
Mosquito abundances and species assemblages also differ seasonally as environmental variables such as temperature and rainfall change. This work package will survey a broad variety of wetland habitats across Northern Ireland to assess how mosquito communities change through space and time.
Our surveys will include habitats such as flooded grasslands, wet woodlands, saltmarshes, ponds, reedbeds, farms, and urban areas. We will assess how land use gradients, ranging from natural to more human-altered environments, shape the species and communities of mosquitoes found. Collected mosquitoes will be preserved and identified in the laboratory.
Overall, this approach will reveal the mosquito community in Northern Ireland under environmental gradients, including the occurrence of taxa that could vector disease. It will also unveil whether human activities are changing the composition of species that we find.
