Due to their potential role in pathogen transmission, invasive mosquitoes pose considerable threats to human and animal health. Several studies have identified the most important ecological drivers mediating the establishment and spread of key mosquito species (e.g., Aedes aegypti, and Ae. albopictus), and made predictions for future distribution. We evaluated the effect of an exhaustive list of environmental predictors on the distribution of three invasive species in Hungary (Ae. albopictus, Ae. japonicus, and Ae. koreicus) by using the same standards for data collection based on citizen science observations. Current distribution maps of these species were generated from a 5-year survey, then were compared with various predictor maps reflecting climate, habitat type, food supply, traffic, and interspecific competition by using a boosted regression trees approach that resulted in a subset of variables with the strongest impact. The best predictor sets were used to predict the probability of occurrence of the focal species for the whole country, and these predictions based on citizen science were evaluated against the results of an independent recent field surveillance. We uncovered species-specific patterns and found that different predictor sets were selected for the three different species, and only predictions for Ae. albopictus could be validated with direct trapping data. Therefore, citizen science informed distribution maps can be used to identify ecological predictors that determine the spread of invasive mosquitoes, and to estimate risk based on the predicted distribution in the case of Ae. albopictus.

由于它们在病原体传播中的潜在作用，入侵蚊子对人类和动物健康构成相当大的威胁。几项研究已经确定了介导关键蚊子物种（例如埃及伊蚊和白纹伊蚊）建立和传播的最重要生态驱动因素，并对未来的分布进行了预测。我们基于公民科学观察使用相同的数据收集标准，评估了详尽的环境预测因子列表对匈牙利三种入侵物种（Ae. albopictus、Ae. japonicus 和 Ae. koreicus）分布的影响。这些物种的当前分布图是通过一项为期 5 年的调查生成的，然后通过使用提升回归树方法与反映气候、栖息地类型、食物供应、交通和种间竞争的各种预测图进行比较，从而产生影响最强的变量子集。最佳预测因子集用于预测整个国家焦点物种出现的概率，这些基于公民科学的预测是根据最近一项独立的现场监测结果进行评估的。我们发现了物种特异性模式，发现为三个不同的物种选择了不同的预测因子集，并且只有对 Ae. albopictus 的预测才能用直接诱捕数据进行验证。因此，公民科学知情分布图可用于识别决定入侵蚊子传播的生态预测因子，并根据白纹 Ae. albopictus 的预测分布估计风险。