title: A breeding site model for regional, dynamical malaria simulations evaluated using in situ temporary ponds observations.
abstract: Daily observations of potential mosquito developmental habitats in a suburb of Kumasi in central Ghana reveal a strong variability in their water persistence times, which ranged between 11 and 81 days. The persistence of the ponds was strongly tied with rainfall, location and size of the puddles. A simple power-law relationship is found to fit the relationship between the average pond depth and area well. A prognostic water balance model is derived that describes the temporal evolution of the pond area and depth, incorporating the power-law geometrical relation. Pond area increases in response to rainfall, while evaporation and infiltration act as sink terms. Based on a range of evaluation metrics, the prognostic model is judged to provide a good representation of the pond coverage evolution at most sites. Finally, we demonstrate that the prognostic equation can be generalised and equally applied to a grid-cell to derive a fractional pond coverage, and thus can be implemented in spatially distributed models for relevant vector- borne diseases such as malaria.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana; Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. eoheneasare@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Ernest O
authors.initials: EO
authors.lastname: Asare
authors.forename: Adrian M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Tompkins
authors.forename: Leonard K
authors.initials: LK
authors.lastname: Amekudzi
authors.forename: Volker
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ermert
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D009033:Culicidae / Q000254:growth & development*; D017753:Ecosystem; D005869:Ghana / Q000453:epidemiology; D008288:Malaria / Q000453:epidemiology*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D061005:Ponds; D011891:Rain; D013997:Time Factors