General description

The most important challenge in wide-area mosquito control projects today internationally is how, depending on the objectives and available resources, five basic needs can be combined for the best implementation of these projects in conjunction with their most important side benefit, which is the ability to produce, organizing, and disseminating to other users a series of useful meteorological, environmental, and entomological data in a user-friendly format for politicians, civil servants, and citizens:

• Rapid collection of useful field data (specific parameters from mature monitoring networks).
• Easy-to-use electronic applications for entering the above data in the field.
• Data analysis and synthesis capabilities for decision-making either in real time in emergency situations or subsequently for understanding and strategy formulation purposes.
• Information, awareness-raising, and training for the general public and professional sectors (health professionals, tourism stakeholders, etc.).
• Production of primary environmental and entomological data, retrieval and processing from electronic applications in the field or large European platforms with earth observations and meteorological data, and the ability to disseminate these to users in the public and private sectors

The quality and management of field data collected by public and private mosquito control agencies is particularly poor internationally, and their actions, at least outside Europe, usually involve mainly pre-determined spraying, basically adulticiding and less larviciding, without necessarily being preceded by sampling. The problem of non-collection or collection of low-quality data, or low-level utilization and, in most cases, the absence of any utilization, also applies in the case of basic environmental data such as meteorological data, which can obviously be used more widely.

The systematic collection of data (primary, processed, and open-type data covering a decade from across the country) combined with the physical presence of Eco-Development in the field, and the recent development of significant analytical capabilities and stable cooperation with the Department of Climatology and Meteorology of the Faculty of Geology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (within the framework of the EWSMD research program, see below), allows us to attempt to upgrade a series of products, “Eco-development Digital Toolkit.”

Since early 2020, Ecodevelopment and the Meteorology and Climatology Section of the Department of Geology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki have been actively participating in a consortium established under the responsibility of the National Observatory of Athens with 14 other organizations from five European countries countries with the aim of competing for an award under the EIC (European Innovation Council) PRIZE Early Warning System for Epidemics (deadline 16/02/2021). The partners in this consortium include the most important European bodies with extensive time series of entomological data (Instituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie, Italy, EID-Méditerrannée, France, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and Kommunale Aktionsgemeinschaft zur Bekämpfung der Schnakenplage e.V. (KABS), Germany). Access to hundreds of thousands of species-level entomological data from across Europe will enable the proposed project to significantly improve the basic Bad abundance prediction model on which the open mosquito nuisance prediction application Mosquito Vision is based.

The Mosquito Vision app provides reliable five-day forecasts of mosquito nuisance for residents, tourism professionals, and visitors for all settlements in the Region of Central Macedonia. At the same time, it is a useful tool for health professionals and mosquito control projects, both for operational analysis and for optimising decision-making.

Since 01/05/2023, it has been put into operation, providing daily a five-day forecast of mosquito nuisance for all settlements in the Region (830), for the evening (20:30-22:30) and night (after 22:30). This application also provides interactive features: citizens can indicate possible mosquito breeding sites anywhere, as well as rate the level of mosquito nuisance in their area of interest.

The app can be downloaded free of charge by anyone interested from:

the Google PlayStore

(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gr.ecodev.mosquitovision)

and the App Store

(https://apps.apple.com/gr/app/mosquito-vision/id1573016624).

The production and collection of primary data from 2010 to the present and the running of the mosquito abundance prediction model on which the application is based is the responsibility of Eco-Development. The Meteorology and Climatology Section of the Department of Geology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is responsible for producing daily five-day meteorological forecasts with a spatial resolution of 2x2km for the entire Region of Central Macedonia (which includes supplementing the existing network of meteorological stations with 10 new stations).

As part of the project, a platform was created for the collection and sharing of information and forecasts with the three above-mentioned Directorates of the Region and/or other potential users. The constant supply of environmental, meteorological, and entomological data and corresponding forecasts to the platform in a simple office PC environment allows users to organize data, perform calculations, conduct simple data analysis, visualisation and extraction of specific results.

The “Mosquito Vision” platform has six fields (Remote Sensing, Water Monitoring, Mosquito Vision -app-, Land Use, Weather Stations, Entomological Data -under construction-) and is installed on the server of Ecodevelopment S.A. It is accessible via the following link:

https://ecodevsa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=7b01c35696b1466ea4b362dd6e2b5586

Access to the platform requires the use of credentials (username and password), which are sent to end users by the administrator (Ecodevelopment).

In order to familiarize potential users from the Region of Central Macedonia with the operation of the platform and the possibilities it offers, a series of seminars will be held by two specialized executives from Ecodevelopment.