Integrating statistical and mechanistic approaches with biotic and environmental variables improves model predictions of the impact of climate and land-use changes on future mosquito-vector abundance, diversity and distributions in Australia

Changes to Australia's climate and land-use patterns could result in expanded spatial and temporal distributions of endemic mosquito vectors including Aedes and Culex species that transmit medically important arboviruses. Climate and land-use changes greatly influence the suitability of habitats for mosquitoes and their behaviors such as mating, feeding and oviposition. Changes in these behaviors in turn determine future species-specific mosquito diversity, distribution and abundance. In this review, we discuss climate and land-use change factors that influence shifts in mosquito distribution ranges. We also discuss the predictive and epidemiological merits of incorporating these factors into a novel integrated statistical (SSDM) and mechanistic species distribution modelling (MSDM) framework. One potentially significant merit of integrated modelling is an improvement in the future surveillance and control of medically relevant endemic mosquito vectors such as Aedes vigilax and Culex annulirostris, implicated in the transmission of many arboviruses such as Ross River virus and Barmah Forest virus, and exotic mosquito vectors such as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. We conducted a focused literature search to explore the merits of integrating SSDMs and MSDMs with biotic and environmental variables to better predict the future range of endemic mosquito vectors. We show that an integrated framework utilising both SSDMs and MSDMs can improve future mosquito-vector species distribution projections in Australia. We recommend consideration of climate and environmental change projections in the process of developing land-use plans as this directly impacts mosquito-vector distribution and larvae abundance. We also urge laboratory, field-based researchers and modellers to combine these modelling approaches. Having many different variations of integrated (SDM) modelling frameworks could help to enhance the management of endemic mosquitoes in Australia. Enhanced mosquito management measures could in turn lead to lower arbovirus spread and disease notification rates.

Asynchrony of wind and hydropower resources in Australia

Wind and hydropower together constitute nearly 80% of the renewable capacity in Australia and their resources are collocated. We show that wind and hydro generation capacity factors covary negatively at the interannual time scales. Thus, the technology diversity mitigates the variability of renewable power generation at the interannual scales. The asynchrony of wind and hydropower resources is explained by the differential impact of the two modes of the El Ni˜no Southern Oscillation - canonical and Modoki - on the wind and hydro resources. Also, the Modoki El Ni˜no and the Modoki La Ni˜na phases have greater impact. The seasonal impact patterns corroborate these results. As the proportion of wind power increases in Australia's energy mix, this negative covariation has implications for storage capacity of excess wind generation at short time scales and for generation system adequacy at the longer time scales.

The potential wind power resource in Australia: a new perspective

Australia's wind resource is considered to be very good, and the utilization of this renewable energy resource is increasing rapidly: wind power installed capacity increased by 35% from 2006 to 2011 and is predicted to account for over 12% of Australia's electricity generation in 2030. Due to this growth in the utilization of the wind resource and the increasing importance of wind power in Australia's energy mix, this study sets out to analyze and interpret the nature of Australia's wind resources using robust metrics of the abundance, variability and intermittency of wind power density, and analyzes the variation of these characteristics with current and potential wind turbine hub heights. We also assess the extent to which wind intermittency, on hourly or greater timescales, can potentially be mitigated by the aggregation of geographically dispersed wind farms, and in so doing, lessen the severe impact on wind power economic viability of long lulls in wind and power generated. Our results suggest that over much of Australia, areas that have high wind intermittency coincide with large expanses in which the aggregation of turbine output does not mitigate variability. These areas are also geographically remote, some are disconnected from the east coast's electricity grid and large population centers, which are factors that could decrease the potential economic viability of wind farms in these locations. However, on the eastern seaboard, even though the wind resource is weaker, it is less variable, much closer to large population centers, and there exists more potential to mitigate it's intermittency through aggregation. This study forms a necessary precursor to the analysis of the impact of large-scale circulations and oscillations on the wind resource at the mesoscale.