Mind the Mosquitoes!: Preliminary Feedback from the GLOBE Zika Education and Prevention Project

Abstract:

The GLOBE Zika Education and Prevention Project began in 2018 with support from the United States Department of State. The project has three main objectives: (1) to provide Zika education and breeding site elimination, (2) to develop and strengthen networks of public health officials, GLOBE countries, scientists, teachers, and other community members, and (3) provide public health officials with on-the-ground citizen science collected data to track mosquitoes and fight mosquito-borne diseases. Currently ending its third year, the project has shown an unprecedented level of citizen science collection efforts and aims to bridge the gap between citizen science and data usage. Since May 2018, the GLOBE database has had 178,841 entered mosquito observations, from 73 total GLOBE countries. These observations - including location, habitat identification, photos, and larvae count and identification - are accessible through ADAT and API which GIO has added to the GLOBE website to facilitate data access by scientists, health officials, and the GLOBE community. In addition, relationships are being built with several public health officials and organizations to make this project the most useful to the greatest number of scientists and officials. This surveillance, in conjunction with Atmosphere and Hydrosphere data collected through other GLOBE projects and protocols, has already contributed to student and scientist research that have investigated relationships between environmental factors and mosquito larvae prevalence. We are hoping these contributions can increase in the future, and potentially show correlation with NASA satellites.