This project will apply both social and physical sciences to examine mosquito disease vectors in southwestern cities. Uniting entomology, land cover analysis, climate/insect modeling, and institutional ethnography, this project will examine the relationship between institutions and insects in the burgeoning greater-Arizona metropolises stretching from Phoenix and Casa Grande to Marana, Tucson, and Green Valley, an area encompassing a total human population of 5.3 million. The project will synthesize data from direct sampling of mosquito populations, high resolution urban-scale modeling, as well as surveys and mappings of public and professional knowledge. The core method involves the comparison of spatially explicit models (maps) of mosquito distribution in southwestern cities, which are overlain with maps of political and economic information, as well as with data layers reflecting the ecological knowledge of diverse publics, including managers, citizens, and developers. The results will advance knowledge by determining the gaps and overlaps of current human knowledge, management, and political territory with projected environmental changes and insect distributions. This will enable tests of basic theories that predict the match and mismatch of state and public knowledge in the complex ecological-mosquito system.
These results and the technique itself have direct bearing on understanding and dealing with a range of urban management challenges, which have increasingly come to include complex ecological elements, like diseases carried by animals and insects, invasions of novel species of plants, risky fire regimes resulting from rapid growth and populations of urban wildlife. While problems are diverse, they are united by a common quality that makes them especially difficult to manage. Ecological hazards are unevenly distributed, spatially mobile, and temporally unpredictable. Under conditions of accelerating climate change and uneven urban development, these issues will become even more complex. Since the capacities of urban managers and citizens may be poorly matched to the emerging characteristics of these new ecological problems, it is essential to determine how we can improve our understanding and management of urban environmental problems by attending to the shifting distributions of hazards and the gaps between them and the spaces of knowledge and authority designed to cope with them. By coordinating agency members with the public in the final phase of the project using mapped products, we will improve the 'outreach' of agencies to the public and the 'in-reach' of diverse public ecological knowledges to decision-makers, thereby improving insect management and public responses to serious and ongoing health hazards.
