Mosquito Habitat and Dengue Risk Potential in Hawaii: A Conceptual Framework and GIS Application* Korine N. Kolivras Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Dengue is an emerging disease, and the distribution of the mosquito vector is partially mediated by environ- mental conditions. In this article, a new conceptual model is suggested that emphasizes the importance of including environmental variability in mosquito modeling studies. In an applied sense, mosquito habitat maps are developed for Hawaii using a GIS overlay of mosquito survival thresholds of temperature, precipitation, and stream/wetland location. Populated areas represent locations with the potential for an outbreak. The maps are adjustable based on expert knowledge input, and efforts to prevent or control outbreaks can be concentrated in those zones delineated by this study. Key Words: dengue, Hawaii, infectious disease, medical geography, mosquito-borne disease. D engue, spread through the bite of several species of the Aedes mosquito, is consider- ed to be the world’s most important mosquito- borne viral disease in terms of the number of infections and the number of people in the en- demic region (National Research Council 2001). The World Health Organization esti- mates that there are approximately fifty million dengue infections each year, and about 2.5 bil- lion people live in the region in which dengue is endemic (World Health Organization 2002). Following World War II, the disease has be- come a significant problem in developing coun- tries, having spread globally since the end of an eradication program in the 1970s that was de- signed to eliminate the mosquito vector. The distribution of the Aedes mosquito has now spread beyond the area inhabited prior to the start of the program, and dengue is now present in much of the tropics and subtropics, including areas along Mexico’s border with the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention 2005). The focus of this study is the 2001–2002 dengue outbreak in Hawaii, spread by the Aedes albopictus mosquito (Clark et al. 2002; Gratz 2004; Effler et al. 2005). The islands had pre- viously been free of dengue since the 1940s (Gilbertson 1945; Wilbar 1947; Effler et al. 2005), and this outbreak is illustrative of the role dengue is playing on a global scale as an emerg- ing infectious disease. The goals of this article are twofold: to develop an improved conceptual framework for studying mosquito-borne dis- eases that includes ideas of spatial and temporal variability, and to employ environmental vari- ability notions in an examination of mosquito habitat and dengue in Hawaii that can aid in public health decision-support. Specifically, this research seeks to answer the following questions:  What are the fine-scale spatial relation- ships between Ae. albopictus and climate variability?  How do human and physical landscape features interact in Hawaii to create po- tential dengue habitat? These questions are answered through an ex- amination of the broad factors that contribute to the creation of mosquito habitat and potential dengue areas using a geographic information system (GIS), and the development of adjusta- ble (based on user input) mosquito habitat and dengue potential maps for Hawaii for use in *The author would like to thank Andrew Comrie and John Kupfer for their comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript as well as Peter Johnson and the Center for Applied Spatial Analysis at the University of Arizona for technical assistance. The author also thanks the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions that improved this article. The research was partially funded by the University of Arizona Department of Geography, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Arizona, and the UA/NASA Space Grant program. The Professional Geographer, 58(2) 2006, pages 139–154 r Copyright 2006 by Association of American Geographers. Initial submission, May 2005; revised submission, September 2005; final acceptance, October 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K.