Fig. 1

WNV R₀ estimates between months and among Texas counties. Blue boxplots show R₀ estimates across Texas counties within months for a “Full” model, which used the eBird community and NOAA temperature data for each community. Red boxplots show R₀ estimates from a model where each community retained their specific eBird community, but whose temperature was replaced with the average temperature across all of Texas for that month (also see Table 3, Spatially averaged temperature). Variation in R₀ within months attributable to variation in the bird communities (red boxplots) is considerably smaller than the variation explained by spatial variation in temperature. Increases or decreases in medians between the models within months is due to the effects of averaging temperature prior to predicting R₀ using the non-linear functions for mosquito-to-bird transmission and mosquito survival across temperature, a manifestation of Jensen’s inequality. For example, in November the mean temperature across Texas is 13.6 °C, while the SD among counties is 3.30 °C. We estimate average mosquito-to-bird transmission per bite over the first 30 days of mosquito infection to be 2.5% at 13.6 °C, 8.5% at 16.9 °C (+ 1SD) and 25% at 20.2 °C (+ 2 SD)