ULTRA-Ex: Ecological Hazards in Southwestern Metropolises: The Case of Mosquito Disease Vectors

该项目将应用社会科学和自然科学来检查西南城市的蚊子疾病媒介。该项目将昆虫学、土地覆盖分析、气候/昆虫建模和机构人种学结合起来，研究从凤凰城和卡萨格兰德到马拉纳、图森和绿色谷（一个总人口为530万的地区）的新兴亚利桑那州大都市中机构和昆虫之间的关系。该项目将综合来自蚊子种群直接采样、高分辨率城市规模建模以及公共和专业知识调查和绘图的数据。核心方法涉及到比较西南城市蚊子分布的空间显式模型（地图），这些模型与政治和经济信息的地图以及反映不同公众（包括管理人员、公民和开发人员）的生态知识的数据层重叠。研究结果将通过确定当前人类知识、管理和政治领土与预计环境变化和昆虫分布的差距和重叠来促进知识。 这将使基础理论的测试，预测在复杂的生态蚊子系统的国家和公众知识的匹配和不匹配，这些结果和技术本身有直接关系的理解和处理一系列的城市管理挑战，其中越来越多地包括复杂的生态因素，如动物和昆虫携带的疾病，新物种的植物入侵，城市野生动物的快速增长和种群数量导致的危险火灾制度。虽然问题是多种多样的，但它们都有一个共同的特点，这使得它们特别难以管理。 生态灾害分布不均匀，空间上移动的，时间上不可预测。在气候变化加速和城市发展不平衡的条件下，这些问题将变得更加复杂。由于城市管理人员和公民的能力可能与这些新的生态问题的新特点不相适应，因此必须确定我们如何能够通过关注危险的不断变化的分布以及危险与旨在科普危险的知识和权力空间之间的差距来改善我们对城市环境问题的理解和管理。通过在项目的最后阶段使用地图产品协调机构成员与公众，我们将改善机构对公众的“外展”和决策者对各种公共生态知识的“接触”，从而改善昆虫管理和公众对严重和持续健康危害的反应。

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.