Abstract
Citizen science projects are often undertaken for ecological and environmental research purposes but also have great potential for use in microbiology research to track the emergence and spread of pathogens in the environment. Science Solstice and Summer Soil-stice are mycology citizen science projects aimed at collecting air and soil samples, respectively, in the United Kingdom (UK), that will be used to culture Aspergillus fumigatus fungal spores and to determine their drug resistance. A. fumigatus plays an important role in the environment as a decomposer of plant material, but is also a human lung pathogen. Infection with drug-resistant spores can lead to a worse clinical outcome for the patient. On the four solstice and equinox days between June 2018 and March 2019, volunteers were asked to collect air samples from their homes and workplaces and return them to our lab in Freepost envelopes (UK only) or were reimbursed for postage if returning samples from outside of the UK. An additional round of samples was requested from UK volunteers’ gardens and/or compost on the June 2019 solstice. In total, 787 volunteers returned 2,132 air samples and 509 soil samples, which grew a total of 7,991 A. fumigatus colonies. The estimated total cost of the study was £2,650, the equivalent of £0.33 per A. fumigatus colony grown. Incorporating citizen science into the environmental surveillance of drug-resistant A. fumigatus allowed for the simultaneous collection of hundreds of environmental samples across the entire UK on the same day. The insights generated from this study would not be practical in the absence of public participation, which offers opportunities to ask scientific questions that were previously un-askable.
Highlights
Citizen science is defined as the “intentional involvement, in a non-professional capacity, of people in the scientific process, e.g., the collection... of data” (Pocock 2015) and is becoming increasingly popular for simultaneously conducting research and engaging with the public about science
Screenshots of the Google maps sent out to participants after the air- and soil-sampling rounds are shown alongside a United Kingdom (UK) population density map in Figure 3, which shows that the majority of samples were sent in from populous areas
This is a substantial increase in sample coverage compared with previous studies monitoring for azole-resistant A. fumigatus: Alshareef and Robson (2014) collected air samples monthly over a 2-year period from one location in Manchester, Dunne (2017) collected air samples twice monthly for 2 years from 13 locations and soil samples once from 5 locations in Dublin, Tsitsopoulou (2018) collected 44 air samples and 671 soil samples over 5 months across South Wales, and Sewell (2019) collected 178 soils from 6 locations across South England
Summary
Citizen science is defined as the “intentional involvement, in a non-professional capacity, of people in the scientific process, e.g., the collection... of data” (Pocock 2015) and is becoming increasingly popular for simultaneously conducting research and engaging with the public about science. Citizen scientists can report environmental incidents with potentially harmfully effects such as toxic algal blooms (Ransom Hardison 2019) or river pollution (Hyder 2017), and can aid surveillance of invasive species (Pocock and Evans 2014), wildlife diseases (Robinson 2010; Lawson 2012), or plant pathogens (Brown 2017). The majority of these projects asks participants to record their visual observations, either online, through an app, or via post over a prolonged period of time. Examples in the UK include Swab & Send, an ongoing project asking citizen scientists to
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