Modelling

Background

Climate and environmental change can have major impacts on mosquito abundance and distributions. With projected changes to the Scottish climate in the coming decades, as well as associated impacts on land use, it is important to be able to predict how these changes may affect the distribution of mosquito vector species and the risk of disease transmission.

The data we generate in work packages 1-3 will be used alongside existing datasets to create ecological and epidemiological models. Our spatial ecological model will identify associations between species distributions and environmental variables (climate, land use etc.), while our epidemiological model will predict the probability of zoonotic virus establishment in Scotland based on the population dynamics of key vector species. 

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These models will be used to predict vector species distributions and mosquito-borne disease establishment in Scotland under current and future climatic conditions.