Mosquito Alert is an open science platform that engages citizens in a project that has an impact on public, social and educational policy in the fight against disease-transmitting mosquitoes. In this sense, science and citizens have been working together for a long time to identify invasive species in Europe and currently on universal platforms such as "Global Mosquito Alert".
This innovative way of doing science offers new challenges and opportunities, both in terms of improving environmental management and public health management of disease-transmitting mosquitoes, since traditional monitoring and control methods are affected by budget constraints as demand grows and the scale at which to act, as climate change conditions expand their distribution and proliferation.
It is, in any case, an open system and one that is under continuous review and improvement, destined to resolve issues and progress epidemiological models and predictions with increasingly broad and complex citizen science methodologies, in a way that contributes to developing risk maps and online outbreak forecasting, both regionally, in Europe and even globally.
The platform undergoes continuous review and improvement, implementing new measures and solutions that contribute to improving the application and the results obtained. This is achieved through:
• website and mobile app optimization
• publication of an interactive public map of observations that allows consulting and downloading all the observations received and validated since 2014
• development of a probabilistic model for the presence of tiger mosquitoes in the areas of Spain, which is updated weekly and generates monthly estimates for a given area
• Visualization of data through interactive graphics in real time, which allows to view participation in different areas and analyze the quality of the data
• Citizen identification of tiger mosquitoes and yellow fever quickly and effectively, allowing their validation by at least 5 participants, with assignment of a reliability percentage organized by municipalities.
• expert validation by a team of expert entomologists from collaborating institutions, which allows the possible confirmation of the affected mosquitoes by conducting reviews using 3 independent validators and 3 levels of security (rejected, possible or confirmed). The final result is published on the map and sent to the participant through a notification within the app, occasionally including notes or comments of interest.