Mapping the Habitat Suitability of West Nile Virus Vectors in Southern Quebec and Eastern Ontario, Canada, with Species Distribution Modeling and Satellite Earth Observation Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transmission of vector-borne diseases (VBDs) relies on the presence of their vectors. Good knowledge of their habitat distribution could inform of their presence and then the potential transmission risk. In Canada, West Nile virus (WNV), a VBD transmitted by mosquitoes of the Culex genus to birds, humans, and other mammals, was first reported in 2002. Since then, human cases have been reported every year. To reduce the health burden of the disease and to guide the vector control efforts, this work aims to provide a map of habitat suitability of the main vectors of WNV, Culex pipiens-restuans, in southern Quebec and eastern Ontario at 30 m spatial resolution. Landsat 8-OTI/TIRS images were combined with existing geographical data to characterize vegetated and paved areas in urban and peri-urban areas and to create a land use land cover map related to environmental determinants of Culex pipiens-restuans. Landscape metrics were calculated to characterize the neighborhood environment. They were used with 1008 presence sites of the vectors to build species distribution models with Maxent, a model based on the maximum entropy principle, and to predict habitat suitability for Culex pipiens-restuans in the study area. The performance of the models was very good, with a mean area under the curve of 0.92 and a continuous Boyce index of 0.97. A habitat suitability map of the whole study area was created for Culex pipiens-restuans. The resulting map and environment analysis highlight the importance of the edge of vegetation and mixed or paved areas for the bio-ecology of Culex pipiens-restuans.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".