Roy Rutherford
Master's Degree Candidate
Hartley/Alba Lab
CU Denver Department of Integrative Biology
When: Thursday, April 17th, 2025, 3:00pm
Where: Science Building, Room 4127 (4th Floor Conference Room)
Environmental Health in an Urban Greenway: Assessing Urban Wetland Habitat Features and Larval Mosquito Abundances
Mosquitoes are ubiquitous in urban wetlands and can pose significant public health risks in urban city centers. Both potentially dangerous and well adapted, mosquitoes can take advantage of urban wetlands and stormwater habitats in the form of field depressions, ditches, culverts, catchment basins, spillways, and retention ponds. While constructed wetlands and green stormwater infrastructure practices are being developed and implemented to manage these kinds of habitat spaces and improve their ecological functioning, the mosquito still looms large over urban wetland land management and may still pose risks to people living and recreating near stormwater infrastructure regardless of habitat quality. To support future green stormwater practices and installations, I (and a team of dedicated volunteers and seasonal employees) investigated a suite of urban wetland habitat features and the ways in which they may drive larval mosquito abundances in stormwater habitat patches occurring in Colorado's High Line Canal. Join me for my dissertation defense to learn more about urban wetland habitat and how larval mosquitoes live and breed in stressful stormwater habitats.