Identification of gravid mosquitoes from changes in spectral and polarimetric backscatter cross sections

Abstract

Improving the survey of mosquito populations is of the utmost importance to further enhance mitigation techniques that protect human populations from mosquito‐borne diseases. While mosquito populations are generally studied using physical traps, stand‐off optical sensors allow to study insect ecosystems with potentially better spatial and temporal resolution. This can be greatly beneficial to eco‐epidemiological models and various mosquito control programs. In this contribution, we demonstrate that the gravidity of female mosquitoes can be identified from changes in their spectral and polarimetric backscatter cross sections. Among other predictive variables, the wing beat frequency and the depolarization ratio of the mosquito body allows for the identification of gravid females with a precision and recall of 86% and 87%, respectively. Since female mosquitoes need a blood meal to become gravid, statistics on gravidity is of prime importance as only females that have been gravid might carry infectious diseases. In addition, it allows to detect possible breeding habitat, predict a potential increase in the mosquito population and provide a better overall understanding of the ecosystem dynamics. As a result, targeted and localized mitigation techniques can be used, reducing the cost and improving the efficiency of mosquito population control.

Real-time dispersal of malaria vectors in rural Africa monitored with lidar

“…Recently developed line sensors with higher sample rates could be implemented in lidar systems, which would potentially improve the frequency analysis and classification. Additional spectral- and polarization bands have been shown to enable the classification of similar species [ 22 ] and the distinction of gravid from non-gravid females [ 50 ] in the laboratory, despite the overlapping WBF distributions of the groups. Radial activity maps could be obtained by scanning the laser beam slowly over a field.…”

An Opto-Electronic Sensor-Ring to Detect Arthropods of Significantly Different Body Sizes

“…Concerning flying insects, mostly fruitflies were detected by using opto-electronic sensors in McPhail traps. They had an evolution from the simpler infrared beams to the more sophisticated ones (see in Table 1: Potamitis, Rigakis, Vidakis, Petousis and Weber [20]), which was based on the attributes of arthropods' wingbeats [21,28,29]. The species selectivity is a very big step in automatic monitoring of arthropods, since both practical IPM experts and field ecologists are interested in target pest species or the population dynamics of a particular species.…”

Bark beetles as lidar targets and prospects of photonic surveillance

“…Studies have shown that the body and wings of insects display distinct degrees of linear polarization (DoLP) from various aspects and scattering angles [28–30]. We use the definition of DoLP: …”