The Invasive Mosquito Project: Crowdsourcing and citizen science for a public health objective

The Invasive Mosquito project (IMP) created a crowdsourced mosquito monitoring network across the United States aimed at determining the distributions of invasive mosquito disease vector species. The project consists of the established North American Mosquito Project network composed of public health and mosquito control professionals and a new crowdsourced insect monitoring group consisting of high school teachers. To aid in recruitment of teacher collaborators, the teachers were provided written lesson plans, power point presentations, and written protocols. The students in the teachers class collected container mosquitoes using standardized oviposition collection and larval/pupal collections from pools of water around their property.  A small subset of the eggs and larvae/pupae, were reared and emerged adults were identified to species. The mosquito data (abundance and distribution) was uploaded to a central website, which contains an updated map of all the collaborating agencies and schools as well as their collections by mosquito species. The project objectives were to: (1) determine the extant geographic distribution of invasive mosquito species, (2) determine at risk human and animal populations based on mosquito species distributions, (3) educate the general public of the risk of mosquito-borne diseases, (4) create a network of potential collectors, (5) build a central database to store mosquito distribution data and manage social and crowd sourced network resources.  

The IMP engages students because they generate data to determine the geographic distribution of major disease vector mosquitoes of medical and veterinary importance (Aedes albopictus, Ae. aegypti, Ae. japonicus, Ae. triseriatus, and Ae. sierrensis).This data is needed to estimate the areas of the United States at risk for chikungunya and dengue virus transmission, as well as, other viruses or pathogens transmitted by native and invasive container mosquito species and by contributing to a larger website and national mission students receive data as well as contribute.