Abstract
Intensified travel activities of humans and the ever growing global trade create opportunities of arthropod-borne disease agents and their vectors, such as mosquitoes, to establish in new regions. To update the knowledge of mosquito occurrence and distribution, a national mosquito monitoring programme was initiated in Germany in 2011, which has been complemented by a citizen science project, the ‘Mückenatlas’ since 2012. We analysed the ‘Mückenatlas’ dataset to (1) investigate causes of variation in submission numbers from the start of the project until 2017 and to (2) reveal biases induced by opportunistic data collection. Our results show that the temporal variation of submissions over the years is driven by fluctuating topicality of mosquito-borne diseases in the media and large-scale climate conditions. Hurdle models suggest a positive association of submission numbers with human population, catch location in the former political East Germany and the presence of water bodies, whereas precipitation and wind speed are negative predictors. We conclude that most anthropogenic and environmental effects on submission patterns are associated with the participants’ (recording) behaviour. Understanding how the citizen scientists’ behaviour shape opportunistic datasets help to take full advantage of the available information.
Highlights
Mosquito-borne diseases pose an increasing threat to human and animal health worldwide
The number of specimens sent to the ‘Mückenatlas’ in the above time period adds up to 110,581; 3950 additional samples of arthropods submitted did not belong to the family Culicidae and were excluded from the study
The autumn months October and November still exhibit over 1000 submissions each, and are followed by a considerable decline during winter and spring, before submission numbers rise again in May (Fig. 2b)
Summary
Mosquito-borne diseases pose an increasing threat to human and animal health worldwide. They catch and send physical samples that are determined to species level by the project’s experts according to a standardised protocol[11] In this way, the ‘Mückenatlas’ has the benefits of citizen science—large observation numbers and a large geographic scale—while taking a rather conservative approach to ensure data quality instead of controlling for data quality issues with tools such as crowdsourcing, external expert validation or in-process data vetting[8,9]. Other case studies of observation patterns focus on intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of citizen s cientists[27,28], less commonly on general environmental or anthropogenic factors associated with volunteers’ recordings for large-scale citizen science projects[29,30] Analysing these driving factors, would help utilise opportunistic data collections to full extent and design future citizen science projects
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