title: Environmental forcing shapes regional house mosquito synchrony in a warming temperate island.
abstract: Seasonal changes in the abundance of exothermic organisms can be expected with climate change if warmer temperatures can induce changes in their phenology. Given the increased time for ectothermic organism development at lower temperatures, we asked whether population dynamics of the house mosquito, Culex pipiens s.l. (L.) (Diptera: Culicidae), in Jeju-do (South Korea), an island with a gradient of warming temperatures from north to south, showed differences in sensitivity to changes in temperature along the warming gradient. In addition, we asked whether synchrony, that is, the degree of concerted fluctuations in mosquito abundance across locations, was affected by the temperature gradient. We found the association of mosquito abundance with temperature to be delayed by 2 wk in the north when compared with the south. The abundance across all our sampling locations had a flat synchrony profile that could reflect impacts of rainfall and average temperature on the average of all our samples. Finally, our results showed that population synchrony across space can emerge even when abundance is differentially impacted by an exogenous factor across an environmental gradient.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Environmental Sciences and Global Center of Excellence Program on Integrated Field Environmental Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo-shi, Kita-ku, Sapporo, Japan. lchaves@ees.hokudai.ac.jp
authors.forename: Luis Fernando
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Chaves
authors.forename: Yukiko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Higa
authors.forename: Su Hyun
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.forename: Ji Yeon
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Jeong
authors.forename: Sang Taek
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Heo
authors.forename: Miok
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Noboru
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Minakawa
authors.forename: Keun Hwa
authors.initials: KH
authors.lastname: Lee
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D057231:Climate Change; D003465:Culex / Q000502:physiology*; D005843:Geography; D062312:Islands; D011157:Population Dynamics; D056910:Republic of Korea; D012621:Seasons; D013696:Temperature; D014887:Weather