Vector Biology: The Ecology and Evolution of Vector-borne Pathogen Transmission

The major goalof this project isto discover the connections, across ecological scales, betweenthe biology of insect vectors of disease and the risk of pathogen transmission. We focus on the organimsal biology of arthropod vectors, from the levels of indivdidual physiology up through landscape levels. We use a variety of ecological theory and tools to guide our inquiry, including animal movement, intra- and inter-specfiic interactions, population genetics and genomics, and GIS/Spatial analyses. We have three specific goals supported by this project: 1. Characterize the landscape determinants of mosquito species diversity and distributions and use population genetic tools to understand how mosquitoes may move around the landscape; 2. Understand the community ecology of larval mosquitoes, with an emphasis on containerAedesspecies; and 3. Connect the individual, larval behavioral and physiologicalecology of containerAedeswith important adult characteristics critical to the transmission of disease.