Bird species involved in West Nile virus epidemiological cycle in southern Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There have been many studies of the ecology of West Nile Virus (WNV) in the US, including the role of different bird species as reservoirs and mid-late summer shifts of feeding of Culex pipiens-restuans (CPR) mosquitoes from birds to mammals. It is often assumed that these findings are generalizable to neighbouring regions of Canada where WNV is endemic; however there have been little equivalent studies in Canada to confirm that this is reasonable. Here we construct a priority list of bird species likely involved in the transmission of WNV in the greater Montreal area by combining three sources of data i) results of WNV surveillance in wild (dead) birds in the province (2002-2015); ii) evidence from molecular blood meal analysis that bird species are fed upon by CPR, the primary enzootic vectors of WNV in the region, collected in mosquito surveillance in the study area in 2008 and 2014; and iii) a literature review on evidence of sero-prevalence and host competence of resident bird species. Three lists of 18, 23 and 53 bird species, respectively, from the three data sources, and totalizing 67 bird species were identified as potential WNV reservoirs/amplifiers. Of the 23 species identified from CPR blood meals, Common starlings, American robins, Song and House sparrows ranked the highest as possible WNV reservoirs/amplifiers. In addition, we found using logistic regression that the proportion of blood meals taken from birds compared to mammals by CPR declined significantly with surveillance week. These findings indicate broad similarity in the ecology of WNV between the study region and northeastern US although the relative importance of some bird species as hosts of CPR and WNV in this area may be somewhat different, and field studies are needed to confirm this, and explore the consequences for the risk of WNV to the human population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".