Biography

I am a mosquito control professional working to control disease and pestiferous mosquitoes with the Broward County Mosquito Control Section. I provide logistical support to the mosquito control operation, gathering data across multiple sources to plan ground or aerial treatments. I have over a decade of experience in mosquito collection and taxonomy with a focus on North American mosquitoes. I am also interest in invasive mosquito introductions and distributions. During my graduate training, I was part of a team that discovered the first record of Aedes aegypti and a breeding population of Aedes albopictus in Canada. I have published and delivered specialized training on invasive mosquito identification and collection for mosquito control professionals and graduate students. My current focus is to raise awareness of invasive mosquito species at the regional and state level.

Biography

Benjamin Allen - Mosquito Control Department
City of Jacksonville

I am an early career scientist and civil servant interested in interspecific competition, predator-prey relationships, and metapopulation dynamics as applied to IPM. During my Ph.D. I studied how intraguild predation might be stabilized in odonate nymphs by context-sensitive shifts in the tradeoffs between anti-predator and prey-seeking behavior. I received extensive training in insect sampling, behavioral assays, experimental design, and statistics that I used to analyze shifting patterns in prey-selection, movement, and subsequent mortality risk across time, and apply that knowledge in my current position.

There have been repeated introductions of non-native species into the United States as well as range-expansions of native species that have displaced natives and other long-established invasive taxon; and these displacements have in some cases been reversed (notably Aedes aegypti re-colonizing urban areas from which Aedes albopictus displaced them). Understanding the mechanisms that facilitate changes in mosquito communities is going to be increasingly important in an era of climate change and increasing globalization; as more wild-spaces are converted into human habitation or otherwise disrupted by human activities. My other major project involves utilizing ArcGIS to map insecticide resistance by species across all of Duval County to at least delineate, if not predict, resistant populations of each species so that management practices can be adjusted in the most cost-effective and least-harmful manner possible. Insecticide chemistry is extremely limited, and resistance is becoming increasingly common. If the spatial distribution of resistance is known, it might be possible to leverage selection and metapopulation dynamics to keep currently-available insecticides useful.

Biography

I am an early career interdisciplinary scientist with a focus on the spatial ecology of medically important arthropod vectors. My research focuses on investigating distributions, abundances, and functional connectivity of vector species. I use a variety of tool sets to investigate these questions, including geographic information systems and remotely-sensed satellite imagery, and I draw from methods developed in the fields of distributional ecology, landscape ecology, and landscape genetics. My interest in disease ecology began as an undergraduate research assistant, and continued throughout my master’s studies, when I focused my thesis project on anthropogenic landscape disturbance and Buruli ulcer disease in Benin, Africa.

During my PhD studies in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, I became further absorbed in spatial modelling of medically important vector species, culminating in my dissertation work “Investigating Distributions, Abundances, and Connectivity of Mosquito Vectors.” As a postdoctoral fellow in the Bacterial Special Pathogens Branch at the CDC, I worked with epidemiologists in Atlanta and in Ethiopia to analyze spatial patterns of environmental bacteria transmission. As an Assistant Professor, my research program continues my work on investigating spatial and environmental variables contributing to mosquito species distributions, abundances, and functional connectivity across the landscape. In this context, my lab analyzes and synthesizes large quantities of field collected data compiled from heterogenous sources, using environmental variables derived from multiple Earth observation products, and a suite of ecological modeling approaches to better inform public health and vector control management strategies. My publication record demonstrates my capacity as a productive early career scientist and my commitment to communicating my research findings to a broader audience.