City of Winnipeg - Insect Control Branch

Problem Statement

The City of Winnipeg’s Insect Control Branch (ICB) of the Public Works Department provides services to Winnipeg residents to control insects, including mosquitoes. The mosquito control program is based on an environmentally mindful insect control strategy, and includes: (1) A larviciding program that is 100% biological and uses four larviciding helicopters, (2) Monitoring and treating over 31,500 hectares of water area on an ongoing basis based on weather conditions, and (3) Monitoring for adult nuisance mosquitoes in New Jersey Light Traps beginning early May.

Key challenges currently facing the ICB include…

• predictive modelling of rainfall/soil moisture content/adult mosquito count
• predictive modelling of larval development versus temperature for spring and summer mosquito species
• predictive modelling of adult mosquito population and daily wind speed (ie. Migration from outside of city to inside of city)
• how rainfall impacts soil moisture (how quickly absorbed in ground)

Data Sources

ICB data is available on the City of Winnipeg’s Open Data Portal:

1. Insect Control - Helicopter Flight Spray,
2. Daily Adult Mosquito Trap Data for the past 6 years
3. 311 Service Requests, including Mosquito Complaints. More datasets may be made available soon. In addition to the City’s Open Data, relevant data on temperature, precipitation, and elevation can be obtained from various sources.

Prerequisites

There is no prerequisite knowledge strongly needed for this problem, but familiarity with GIS data analytics and biological (especially mosquito) life cycles is preferred