Joint space-time modeling of West Nile virus vector mosquito abundance

Mosquitoes are involved in the transmission of West Nile viruses, therefore, their abundance, which depends on the weather conditions and physical environment, are closely linked to major disease outbreaks. The objective of this paper is to provide a geostatistical tool to predict mosquito abundance, which is based on the established relationship between mosquito abundance and meteorological and environmental factors, as well as a stochastic spatiotemporal patterns of mosquito abundance informed from observed mosquito count data. The proposed geostatistical model allows assessing the joint space-time uncertainty regarding the prediction of the mosquito abundance at unsampled location during a week of trapping seasons.