Thanks, I appreciate the s/o!

however we found this effect to be Culex species dependent, with urban mosquitoes less impacted by environmental fluctuation - possibly bc they’re supplemented by urban H20 sources even during dry years

We found that an increase in landscape wetness increases mos abundance, but decreases WNV infection rates. This has been shown in previous studies but now we put it in a quasi causal framework (ie econometric models)

We looked at 3.6 M mosquitoes from >500K trap nights collected by Kern Co Vector Control & paired it with environmental variables including drought metrics

Does more H20 mean more mosquito-borne disease risk?

What about in an area that typically receives little rain? (~6 in/year)?

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

stay tuned for more work in this climate-driven phenology-pathogen space!

There are caveats, but we found an intriguing signal: in cooler CA sites, nymphs may emerge noticeably earlier than larvae. This trend may explain why tick infection rates are higher in these regions compared to warmer sites, where life stages emerge more synchronously.

This builds on Sambado 2024, which examined within-season (jan-june 2021), & expands to explore across-season (spring 2013-2023) dynamics in collab w lizard researchers 🦎

Also out this month in P&V: another topic close to my 💛 - tick phenology!

(tinyurl.com/yc2skb4r)

big thanks to the NCEP team for their editorial support!

These materials are designed for undergrads/techs who are new to R - and who want a conservation-centered perspective, not just typical coding tutorials 🌿📊

I 💛 teaching & long-term ecological field stations.

I have a new piece in @natural-history.bsky.social’s Lessons in Conservation that intertwines my teaching lessons from biometry & passion for long-term research sites (tinyurl.com/2kw8avtz)

I’ll highlight some of my work on droughts, wildfire & latitudinal gradients and their impact on 🦟 & 🕷️(ticks)

during my seminar I will be discussing ideas I think are professionally interesting as a disease ecologist & personally relevant as a Californian

I submitted this piece a while ago but thought I’d throw it up on rxiv prior to my defense next month. If you want to hear more about the study - DM me for a zoom link to my exit seminar!

Thanks Colin! At the very least bats are reducing nuisance pests, which is a plus 🦇

Congrats on all of the exciting pubs this week!

fun fact - my dad’s backyard in Acampo is part of the study area in CA’s Central Valley where I’ve witnessed these bat swarms on pleasant summer nights

This approach provides a more scalable method for quantifying the ecosystem services bats offer, complementing traditional field monitoring efforts

We find that bats preferentially forage over rice fields & their occurrences overlap areas with high mosquito activity, suggesting a potential role in controlling ag pests

I co-led a study w Brian Lee that applies a ML algorithm to convert weather-radar data into bat occurrence maps, which were then analyzed alongside veg & mosquito activity (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...)

Bats are often thought of as ecosystem providers, but to actually quantify the services bats provide, it’s essential to know where they’re foraging