Publishing Citizen Science data on disease vectors
Citizen Scientists collect and share enormous amounts of data on invasive mosquitoes from the Mosquito Alert project as part of new series of papers sharing vector-borne diseases in the scientific journal GigaByte.
Recently published in the journal GigaByte is the latest data release from Mosquito Alert, a citizen science system for investigating and managing disease-carrying mosquitoes. Mosquito-borne illnesses such as dengue and zika are of great concern in Asia, and Singapore is currently facing a dengue “emergency” as it grapples with an outbreak of the seasonal disease that has come unusually early this year. This is an important project for CitizenScience.Asia, as collaborations with this group were a key part in the founding of our organisation, and some of the resulting data collected by students in Hong Kong is part of this important data release. Presenting 13,700 new database records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository, the main database collecting together biodiversity records, and all linked to photographs submitted by citizen volunteers and validated by entomological experts to determine if it provides evidence of the presence of any of the mosquito vectors of top concern. This is part of a WHO-sponsored special issue of papers in GigaByte presenting biodiversity data for research on human diseases health, incentivising data sharing to fill important particular species and geographic gaps. As long term watchers and fans of Mosquito Alert, it’s great to see this the hard efforts of the researchers and citizen scientists credited in the form of a scientific publication.
Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases in humans. There are large gaps in knowledge related to these vectors, and data mobilization campaigns are required to improve data coverage to help research on vector-borne diseases and human health. These efforts have been supported by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, hosted at the World Health Organization. Through this launching the “Vectors of human disease” thematic series with GBIF and GigaScience Press. Incentivising the sharing of this extremely important data, publishing costs have been waived to assist with the global call for novel data. This effort has already led to the release of newly digitised location data for over 600,000 vector specimens observed across the Americas and Europe.
While paying credit to such a large number of volunteers, creating such a large public collection of validated mosquito images allows this dataset to be used to train computational AI models for vector detection and classification. Increasing automation in the mosquito recognition process to save time for the professional entomologists. Sharing the data in this novel manner meant the authors of these papers had to set up a new credit system to evaluate contributions from multiple and diverse collaborators, which included university researchers, entomologists, and other non-academics such as citizen scientists. In the GigaByte paper these are acknowledged through collaborative authorship for the Mosquito Alert Digital Entomology Network and the Mosquito Alert Community.
First author Dr Živko Južnič-Zonta from the Centre d’Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CEAB-CSIC) in Spain commented on some unexpected findings from this work:
From a surveillance perspective the system has been able to detect many appearances of Aedes albopictus much beyond its immediate expansion front, like in the Spanish Autonomous Communities of Andalucía and Aragón, which happened as well within other EU countries. A major highlight was the first detection in 2018 of Aedes japonicus [the Asian bush mosquito] in Spain, an isolated population located at a whopping 1,300 km distance of its nearest known location in Europe. This species was not expected to appear and thus was not targeted by any existing surveillance; later up to 2020 the system also collaborated to assess the distribution area of the species across Northern Spain which was actually much broader than estimated in 2018.
Further demonstration of the power of citizen scientists to play a role in public health research, the series also includes an article presenting a database of triatomine kissing bug insects that spread Chagas disease in the Americas. With 90% of the data from the US collected from the Kissing bugs and Chagas Disease in the United States community science program. Demonstrating that citizens can play a key role in contributing to the sum of scientific knowledge and filling crucial data gaps in this extremely important area of global public health. The use of citizen scientists in these studies serves as an example for new inexpensive ways to carry out myriad other such massive data collection projects.
GigaByte’s built from scratch new publishing platform, means publication can be done in a quicker and more interactive manner than traditional scientific papers. Meaning papers in the series include interactive maps and have multilingual options for many papers allowing Portuguese and Spanish speakers to better comprehend the implications of important work relating to the public health of their communities.
Further Reading
Južnič-zonta Ž et al. Mosquito alert: leveraging citizen science to create a GBIF mosquito occurrence dataset, Gigabyte, 2022 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.54
Ceccarelli S et al. American triatomine species occurrences: updates and novelties in the DataTri database, Gigabyte, 2022 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.62
