The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in evaluating the efficacy of Incompatible Insect Technique (IIT) as a mosquito population suppression control strategy designed to disrupt the avian malaria disease cycle. The CESU partner will develop statistical models that incorporate capture rates of Southern house mosquitoes (Culex quinquefasciatus) and the prevalence of Plasmodium relictum in mosquito samples to characterize the efficacy of the IIT project and disease pressure on Hawaiian forest birds in critical forest bird habitat. Another component of this research will be to develop a high-throughput, next-generation sequencing technique to quantify the prevalence of avian malaria and test whether that approach is comparable to quantitative PCR-based avian malaria assays.
