Citizen Science: Promoting Community Surveillance, Vector Research and Local Health

Citizen science is the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research to increase scientific knowledge. The opportunity to contribute to science that fosters community health while simultaneously contributes to advances in global health and controlling vector borne disease is a powerful motivator that engages tens of thousands in mosquito surveillance citizen science. We introduce two international citizen science tools, Mosquito Alert and GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper, and we discuss their contributions toward building public awareness about the importance of individual and community engagement in mosquito surveillance and mitigation. We also describe some of the recent contributions of these tools to mosquito vector research.

Outline:

• Global Mosquito Alert: vision of an international and collaborative citizen science

Tools:

• Mosquito Alert and GLOBE Oberver Mosquito Habitat Mapper

Research and Development:

• The feasibility and usefulness of citizen science in national mosquito monitoring: Mosquito Alert and GLOBE Observer’s applications: creating community-based surveillance programs, building future workforce skills, and contributing tools useful to mosquito control districts
• Creation of interoperable dashboad
• Citizen science contributions to tracking invasive vector species

Next Steps:

• Application of citizen science data to artificial intelligence algorithms for mosquito species identification
• Studying human-mosquito interaction

AMCA Members - This archived webinar along with all AMCA webinars is available free to our active members. We are currently syncing this new system with our database to have seamless identification of our members, but until that is finalized you can access all webinars (live and archived) for free using our membership code which can be found in our member portal here.