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部城市的蚊子病媒。结合昆虫学、土地覆盖分析、气候/昆虫模型和机构人种学，该项目将研究从凤凰城和卡萨格兰德延伸到马拉纳、图森和绿谷的新兴大亚利桑那州大都市中机构和昆虫之间的关系，该地区的总人口为530万。该项目将综合从蚊子种群的直接采样、高分辨率城市规模建模以及公众和专业知识的调查和绘制中获得的数据。核心方法包括比较西南城市蚊子分布的空间显式模型(地图)，这些模型(地图)覆盖着政治和经济信息的地图，以及反映不同公众(包括管理者、市民和开发商)生态知识的数据层。结果将通过确定当前人类知识、管理和政治领域与预测的环境变化和昆虫分布的差距和重叠来推进知识。这将使预测国家和公众知识在复杂的生态蚊子系统中匹配和不匹配的基本理论得到测试。这些结果和技术本身直接关系到理解和应对一系列城市管理挑战，这些挑战已经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，新植物物种的入侵，快速增长和城市野生动物种群造成的危险火灾制度。尽管问题多种多样，但它们都有一个共同的特点，这使得它们特别难以管理。生态危害具有分布不均、空间流动性大、时间上不可预测等特点。在气候变化加快、城市发展不平衡的条件下，这些问题将变得更加复杂。由于城市管理者和市民的能力可能不能很好地适应这些新的生态问题的新特点，因此必须确定我们如何才能通过关注不断变化的危险分布以及它们与为应对它们而设计的知识和权威空间之间的差距来改进我们对城市环境问题的理解和管理。通过使用地图产品在项目的最后阶段协调机构成员与公众，我们将改善机构对公众的‘外展’，并将各种公共生态知识‘触达’给决策者，从而改进昆虫管理和公众对严重和持续的健康危害的反应。

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.