To combat the threat of mosquito-borne diseases worldwide, the University of South Florida has launched a mosquito- tracking dashboard that is powered by citizen science.
Funded by a four-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the study is part of a large-scale project to establish global surveillance of mosquito-borne diseases with automated mosquito identification.
Mosquito Alert, NASA's GLOBE Observer and iNaturalist are partners. Every app uses citizen science, where people around the world take pictures of mosquitoes with their phones.
The dashboard has the potential to provide data at a frequency and geographic resolution otherwise impossible because of cost and other constraints.
The dashboard is an example of a unification of global citizen science platforms. "This tool will help mosquito control personnel to find and destroy invaders and monitor diseases on an international basis by using the computers people carry around in their pockets every day."
More than one million people are killed by mosquitoes each year, making them the most deadly animal on the planet. Community defense depends on the fact that only a small portion of the mosquito species transmit diseases.
Given the lack of vaccines and cures, there is a need for increased and sustained mosquito eradication. Researchers, mosquito-control personnel and policymakers will be helped by the real-time data on this dashboard.
In order to test the effectiveness of citizen science for the prevention of mosquito-borne diseases, Carney and a team of three students from the University of South Florida were asked to work with citizen scientists. The first iNaturalist observations in the U.S. of Aedes scapularis resulted from the citizen scientists' efforts. In Florida, where the species recently invaded, the documentation is a model for monitoring.
The study will serve as a reference for the planning and execution of citizen science projects.
In the remainder of the grant, the engineering professor at the University of South Florida will lead efforts to train and test artificial intelligence. The software will be used to identify mosquitoes in uploaded citizen science images.
"Our software is very accurate in detecting critical mosquitoes," he said. It will yield useful tools to fight diseases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a new campaign to track the spread of the mosquito-borne disease Anopheles stephensi in Africa, and will be testing the Algorithms. The MosquitoesInAfrica.org encourages citizen scientists in Africa to share their mosquito photos.
"As this work takes on a bigger focus on Africa, the project can aid mosquito-borne disease prevention in susceptible populations," said Karlene Rivera, an undergraduate student researcher working on the grant. The project has major implications in the field of artificial intelligence.
More information: Ryan Carney et al, Integrating Global Citizen Science Platforms to Enable Next-Generation Surveillance of Invasive and Vector Mosquitoes, Insects (2022). DOI: 10.3390/insects13080675
All Rights Reserved © 2024
