Involvement of the civil society to monitor Aedes albopictus populations: a pilot study toward the first mosquito SIT test on a Mediterranean Island.

The Asian tiger mosquito Aedes albopictus is an invasive species well established in the Campania Region and its islands, (Southern Italy). In 2016, at the Department of Biology of the University of Naples Federico II, we started a pilot study of the local A. albopictus population in Procida, the smallest island of Naples gulf. With the help of the island administration and in collaboration with the University of Rome La Sapienza, we are actively involving the Procida citizens as volunteers to monitor, using ovitraps, the seasonal and spatial distribution of this mosquito. We are using environmental data collection and GIS to create a map of mosquito distribution in Procida. Procida has unique features for a future successful SIT test: small size (3.7 Km2), completely urbanized and accessible territory, high population density (10000 inhabitants) and a strong presence of A. albopictus. Furthermore, the Procida worldwide famous image could help to get easily great media coverage in case of very positive SIT result and this could help in future larger tests. We recently started also a crowdfunding campaign to collect resources and to involve local people and in September 2016, we will start an informative campaign, involving schools, to reduce larval breeding sites. Our plan is to collect baseline data for two year, creating at the same time a network of active civil society collaboration and next to apply SIT on the island, in collaboration with IAEA, to get an as much strong as possible suppression of the local population of Asian tiger mosquito. Our long term and most ambitious objective is to try to obtain a quite complete elimination of this invasive species from the island to help the local economy, mainly based on tourism, and to induce then the application of mosquito SIT-based control methods on other islands of Campania Region as well as on the mainland.