Desert Data Labs
The NEON Explorer Suite · Mosquitoes

NEON Mosquitoes

A Shiny web app for exploring the National Ecological Observatory Network's CO2-trap mosquito data. NEON is a network of research sites across the United States that measures the same things the same way at every site, every year. This app turns mosquito trap collections at 46 sites, from desert monsoon country to arctic tundra, into maps, community profiles, and per-species cards. It shows how busy the mosquitoes are as an honest catch rate, mosquitoes per trap-night, not a population count, and it keeps an eye on Culex, the group that can carry West Nile virus.

Open Mosquito Pulse View on GitHub
Mosquito Pulselaunch → Driver Cascade Small Mammals Ground Beetles Plant Diversity Plant Phenology Veg Structure Water Chemistry Birds Little Inverts
What it does

The app opens to a national map of NEON sites coloured by biome. Tap one to dive into its mosquitoes, or step back and compare the whole network in climate space. Each site loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app, with no network round-trip. From there it ranks the most-caught species, estimates how many kinds really use the site, plots every species by how widespread and how busy it is, and traces the seasonal pulse that follows the summer rains.

It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about how NEON tracks mosquitoes, and the public-health and field crews who want to see when and where the West Nile carriers are flying.

Highlights

Select-a-site map · A national map of all 46 bundled sites, coloured by biome, with a one-tap load and an accessible list fallback. The demo opens Santa Rita, Sonoran-desert monsoon country south of Tucson.
Swarm Board · Every species as a dot: how widespread it is (the share of trap-nights it turned up on) against how busy it is (mosquitoes per trap-night). Culex, the West Nile group, is called out. Tap any dot to pin its card.
The monsoon pulse · Mosquito activity by week of the year, with the site's summer-rain window shaded behind it. In the desert the pulse rides the monsoon: rain fills the washes, and a wave of new adults emerges a couple of weeks later.
Across the continent · Every NEON site placed in climate space (monsoon rainfall for the deserts, degree-days for the cooler sites) against its mosquito community. Space-for-time, stated plainly on the chart.
Honest abundance: a catch index · Counts are mosquitoes per trap-night, never a population. CO2 traps lure host-seeking females, so a big night means high activity, not a true headcount, and the app says so on every chart.
Community, beyond a few traps · Species accumulation by trap-night plus a Chao2 estimate of how many kinds really use the site, since traps miss the rare and the few-and-far-between.
Species profile cards · A downloadable card (PNG + CSV) for any species: catch index, how widespread, female share, the seasonal curve, and clickable data-quality flags you can download.
46
research sites
~60
kinds of mosquito
1 night
per trap set
monsoon
sets the pulse
How we keep it honest
Every chart says how its number was made. When we show how busy a species is, that is a catch rate (mosquitoes per trap-night), not a headcount, because a CO2 trap counts the host-seeking females that fly toward it, not every mosquito living nearby. Big catches are scaled honestly: NEON identifies a set fraction of a huge night and we scale it back up to the whole trap, and we divide by trap-nights so a trap that ran longer is not credited with extra mosquitoes. Counts of how many kinds live at a site are adjusted so sites trapped more often are not credited with extra species just for being visited more. When we compare sites across the country, we are comparing 46 different places watched at the same time, not one place getting warmer or wetter over the years, so the patterns are a starting point for questions, not proof of cause. Rainfall is shown only at sites with an actual gauge, never guessed. And the activity of Culex, the West Nile group, is a heads-up about where the carriers are flying, never a measure of who is infected, which is a separate question NEON answers with a different program. This is a tool for learning and exploring. It is not affiliated with NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.