Digital Demography, Human-Mosquito Interactions, and the Socio-Ecological Context of Vector-Borne Disease

Digital traces and active mobile positioning methods are improving our understanding of human spatial behavior, offering important glimpses into the mobility patterns and human-mosquito biting networks that shape disease dynamics.

Networked citizen science makes it possible for ordinary people to identify and report disease-vector mosquitoes wherever they encounter them, and for researchers to quickly validate these reports, adjust for sampling bias, and build high-resolution models of mosquito populations and human-mosquito interaction.

In all of this, digital demography is bringing a much needed social science perspective and helping to illuminate the socio-ecological context of vector-borne disease.

Drawing on my work in this area, I will discuss these developments and the exciting directions in which I see digital demography headed.