Untrained Citizens Research Articles

Guardians of the clams: a decadal monitoring effort of endangered giant clams by citizen scientists

ABSTRACT Giant clams are highly conspicuous marine bivalves in the tropical oceans because of their large shells and colourful outer mantle tissues. This makes them an appropriate iconic species for both trained and untrained citizen science surveys. In Singapore, because of good public awareness of giant clams, they are often reported by citizen scientists, who document marine species using photography. Furthermore, these opportunistic records are captured in a comprehensive public blog (Wild Shores of Singapore; https://wildshores.blogspot.com) with specific details of the field surveys. This study presents the first feasible effort in establishing a long-term dataset based on citizen science observations to report giant clam species-level population status and trends over time. Between 2011 and 2020, citizen scientists covered 8.53 km2 of intertidal reef areas and consistently recorded only two giant clam species (Tridacna squamosa and T. crocea) annually. Despite the more comprehensive coverage and sampling of reef areas, the citizen scientists did not encounter the other native species: Hippopus hippopus, T. gigas and T. maxima. Also, the respective densities of T. squamosa and T. crocea were 0.00120 and 0.00034 individuals per 100 m2, which makes them the smallest known giant clam populations in the Indo-Pacific region. Regardless, the sampling efforts of citizen scientists were generally similar across the years, but future surveys could adapt different survey protocols for the respective giant clam species. Findings from this study also support the marine conservation efforts in Singapore, such as using active intervention measures to protect their giant clams. Additionally, lessons learnt from these citizen science observations can be harnessed to encourage monitoring of giant clams throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

On becoming edGe-ucated

In his 55 years as an educator, G. Thomas Fox has taught elementary school, researched educational policy and practice at primary school through university levels, and guided teachers and other educators as they researched their own professional settings. He has done this work in three countries: the U.S., England, and Iceland. In the past three decades he has drawn attention to much research showing that untrained citizens of the world have engaged successfully with frontiers in the sciences and other expert fields of inquiry and explained what it can mean for education. He calls the processes that are applied for the untrained to understand and engage with expert unknowns, “edGe-ucating.”
 Fox tells stories that show how his teaching and researching experiences could rarely be considered edGe-ucating -- and explains why in terms of the abilities shown by his students and educational colleagues that he had not realized they had. He then describes and analyzes how others, primarily from the sciences and other fields of inquiry, have achieved edGe-ucating through a range of its possible manifestations. Thus, the process certainly is often gainfully harnessed, but outside what we normally classify as education. Combining what he has learned about edGe-ucating with experiences others have reported, he suggests how edGe-ucating can be more intentionally accomplished through integrating education with the fields of expert inquiry – institutionally as well as procedurally. The secret for such an integration, he suggests, is in acknowledging the human capacity to deal with uncertainty. That is what makes engaging with expert unknowns possible at all levels of schooling along with other settings requiring problems solving. And he argues that schools should take note.
 The excitement found in this book is both in how educating occurs within the challenges of classroom teaching and in the work of bringing research into educational settings. The passion shared is about the new opportunities that could be created for individuals, cultures, societies, and fields of inquiry if all citizens were working at the frontiers of expert unknowns – with or without schooling.
 The book thus endeavors to present a novel and refreshing view of education showing how students, at all ages, can gainfully be taken directly to the constantly advancing frontiers of knowledge. The journey also presents the reader with a profound and critical view of important aspects of educational research and graduate training and thereby bringing to life the bond between education and research.

Civic Reporting Indicators and Biocultural Conservation: Opportunities and Challenges for Sustainable Tourism

Citizen science (CS) within sustainable tourism is an underutilized tool for biocultural conservation. The aims of this research integrate conceptual and applied approaches to situate post-positivist and interpretive paradigms within CS and sustainable tourism. The aims are fulfilled by the creation of the new Civic Reporting Indicators (CRIs), developed through analysis of the 174 Global Sustainable Tourism Council Destination (GSTC-D) criteria and indicators. It was determined that 114 indicators are perceivable audibly and/or visibly by untrained citizens. The rearticulation of GSTC-D criteria into the CRIs utilizes embodied perceptions and observations reportable by untrained visitors and residents. The CRIs are framed within ethical principles of research, CS, and sustainable tourism. The inclusion of interpretive paradigms within CS provides epistemological innovation that validates lived experiences and embodied knowledge, fostering agency and empowerment within sustainability narratives. The CRIs may harness end-user observations by utilizing information communication technologies (ICTs) to amass longitudinal and real-time data for smart, sustainable destination management and biocultural conservation. Engaging citizens through the CRIs has the potential to contribute valid observations that amass democratic, longitudinal, and cost-effective data. Designing accessible ICT platforms for destination management may enact civic agency and critical social reflection to democratize sustainability engagement.

Citizen Science to Assess Light Pollution with Mobile Phones

The analysis of the colour of artificial lights at night has an impact on diverse fields, but current data sources have either limited resolution or scarce availability of images for a specific region. In this work, we propose crowdsourced photos of streetlights as an alternative data source: for this, we designed NightUp Castelldefels, a pilot for a citizen science experiment aimed at collecting data about the colour of streetlights. In particular, we extract the colour from the collected images and compare it to an official database, showing that it is possible to classify streetlights according to their colour from photos taken by untrained citizens with their own smartphones. We also compare our findings to the results obtained from one of the current sources for this kind of study. The comparison highlights how the two approaches give complementary information about artificial lights at night in the area. This work opens a new avenue in the study of the colour of artificial lights at night with the possibility of accurate, massive and cheap data collection.

A novel mechanical chest compressor with rapid deployment in all population cardiopulmonary resuscitation

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) resuscitates patients suffering from cardiac arrest. Mechanical chest compression CPR highlights the need for high CPR quality to facilitate survival and neurological recovery. However, current CPR devices cannot be used on pregnant women or infants. These devices’ long re-setup times interrupt CPR and can cause cerebral ischemia. This study designed a novel device with a crank-sliding mechanism. The polar coordinate system (r, θ, z) shortened the setup time and enabled adjustment without moving the patient. We compared our device with commercial products (e.g., LUCAS-2) by quantifying the compression pressure. Control groups for manual CPR of trained physicians and untrained citizens were recruited. We used Resusci Anne products as models. Our results indicated that our design exhibited performance similar to that of LUCAS-2 in adults (557.8 vs. 623.6 mmHg, p = 0.217) and met the current CPR standard guidelines. Notably, our device is applicable to pregnant women [565 vs. 564.5 (adults) mmHg, p = 0.987] and infants [570.8 vs. 564.5 (adults) mmHg, p = 0.801] without lowering the compression quality. The overall compression quality and stability of mechanical chest compression CPR were favorable to those of manual CPR. Our device provides an innovative prototype for the next generation of CPR facilities.

Validation of a screening kit to identify environmental lead hazards

In many states, environmental lead hazards are evaluated only after a lead-poisoned child has been identified. This passive approach is problematic because only a small fraction of children are tested for lead and those with elevated blood lead levels may have irreversible developmental damage. In order to reverse this paradigm, a new lead screening kit was developed. In this study, we validated the accuracy of the kit compared to the conventional methods. Forty-five participants used the kit to collect 3 dust, 3 soil and 2 paint samples in their homes. A researcher performed an in-situ analysis of the lead content in the paint and soil using a portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer. The soil, paint, and dust samples collected by the participants were then analyzed by XRF ex-situ. A strong linear correlation was found between the in-situ and ex-situ measurements for soil and dust samples, and a reasonable correlation was obtained for lead content of paint samples. The kit had very high degrees of specificity (true negative rate) and sensitivity (true positive rate) for detecting hazardous levels of lead in soil and dust samples. The agreement was more moderate for paint samples because some of the paint chips provided gave different readings from the front or back surface, but in-situ XRF only reads from the front surface. Overall, the kit gave a sensitivity of 87%, a specificity of 98% and an accuracy of 96% for detection of environmental lead hazards in samples collected from the home by untrained citizens. This suggests that widespread and inexpensive lead screening could be used to successfully identify hazards and ultimately decrease environmental lead exposure in children.

Value of uncertain streamflow observations for hydrological modelling

Abstract. Previous studies have shown that hydrological models can be parameterised using a limited number of streamflow measurements. Citizen science projects can collect such data for otherwise ungauged catchments but an important question is whether these observations are informative given that these streamflow estimates will be uncertain. We assess the value of inaccurate streamflow estimates for calibration of a simple bucket-type runoff model for six Swiss catchments. We pretended that only a few observations were available and that these were affected by different levels of inaccuracy. The level of inaccuracy was based on a log-normal error distribution that was fitted to streamflow estimates of 136 citizens for medium-sized streams. Two additional levels of inaccuracy, for which the standard deviation of the error distribution was divided by 2 and 4, were used as well. Based on these error distributions, random errors were added to the measured hourly streamflow data. New time series with different temporal resolutions were created from these synthetic streamflow time series. These included scenarios with one observation each week or month, as well as scenarios that are more realistic for crowdsourced data that generally have an irregular distribution of data points throughout the year, or focus on a particular season. The model was then calibrated for the six catchments using the synthetic time series for a dry, an average and a wet year. The performance of the calibrated models was evaluated based on the measured hourly streamflow time series. The results indicate that streamflow estimates from untrained citizens are not informative for model calibration. However, if the errors can be reduced, the estimates are informative and useful for model calibration. As expected, the model performance increased when the number of observations used for calibration increased. The model performance was also better when the observations were more evenly distributed throughout the year. This study indicates that uncertain streamflow estimates can be useful for model calibration but that the estimates by citizen scientists need to be improved by training or more advanced data filtering before they are useful for model calibration.

Is Ocean Reflectance Acquired by Citizen Scientists Robust for Science Applications?

Monitoring the dynamics of the productivity of ocean water and how it affects fisheries is essential for management. It requires data on proper spatial and temporal scales, which can be provided by operational ocean colour satellites. However, accurate productivity data from ocean colour imagery is only possible with proper validation of, for instance, the atmospheric correction applied to the images. In situ water reflectance data are of great value due to the requirements for validation and reflectance is traditionally measured with the Surface Acquisition System (SAS) solar tracker system. Recently, an application for mobile devices, “HydroColor”, was developed to acquire water reflectance data. We examined the accuracy of the water reflectance measures acquired by HydroColor with the help of both trained and untrained citizens, under different environmental conditions. We used water reflectance data acquired by SAS solar tracker and by HydroColor onboard the BC ferry Queen of Oak Bay from July to September 2016. Monte Carlo permutation F tests were used to assess whether the differences between measurements collected by SAS solar tracker and HydroColor with citizens were significant. Results showed that citizen HydroColor measurements were accurate in red, green, and blue bands, as well as red/green and red/blue ratios under different environmental conditions. In addition, we found that a trained citizen obtained higher quality HydroColor data especially under clear skies at noon.

How training citizen scientists affects the accuracy and precision of phenological data.

Monitoring plant and animal phenology is a critical step to anticipating and predicting changes in species interactions and biodiversity. Because phenology necessarily involves frequent and repeated observations over time, citizen scientists have become a vital part of collecting phenological data. However, there is still concern over the accuracy and precision of citizen science data. It is possible that training citizen scientists can improve data quality though there are few comparisons of trained and untrained citizen scientists in the ability of each to accurately and precisely measure phenology. We assessed how three types of observers-experts, trained citizen scientists that make repeated observations, and untrained citizen scientists making once-per-year observations-differ in quantifying temporal change in flower and fruit abundance of American mountain ash trees (Sorbus americana Marsh.) and arthropods in Acadia National Park, Maine, USA. We found that trained more so than untrained citizen science observers over- or under-estimated abundances leading to precise but inaccurate characterizations of phenological patterns. Our results suggest a new type of bias induced by repeated observations: A type of learning takes place that reduces the independence of observations taken on different trees or different dates. Thus, in this and many other cases, having individuals make one-off observations of marked plants may produce data as good if not better than individuals making repeated observations. For citizen science programs related to phenology, our results underscore the importance of (a) attracting the most number of observers possible even if they only make one observation, (b) producing easy-to-use and informative data sheets, and

Exploring applications of crowdsourcing to cryo-EM.

Extraction of particles from cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) micrographs is a crucial step in processing single-particle datasets. Although algorithms have been developed for automatic particle picking, these algorithms generally rely on two-dimensional templates for particle identification, which may exhibit biases that can propagate artifacts through the reconstruction pipeline. Manual picking is viewed as a gold-standard solution for particle selection, but it is too time-consuming to perform on data sets of thousands of images. In recent years, crowdsourcing has proven effective at leveraging the open web to manually curate datasets. In particular, citizen science projects such as Galaxy Zoo have shown the power of appealing to users’ scientific interests to process enormous amounts of data. To this end, we explored the possible applications of crowdsourcing in cryo-EM particle picking, presenting a variety of novel experiments including the production of a fully annotated particle set from untrained citizen scientists. We show the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing particle selection tasks, and explore further options for crowdsourcing cryo-EM data processing.

Testing the Value of Citizen Science for Roadkill Studies: A Case Study from South Africa

Roads impact wildlife through a range of mechanisms from habitat loss and decreased landscape connectivity to direct mortality through wildlife-vehicle collisions (roadkill). These collisions have been rated amongst the highest modern risks to wildlife. With the development of ‘citizen science’ projects, in which members of the public participate in data collection, it is now possible to monitor the impacts of roads over scales far beyond the limit of traditional studies. However, the reliability of data provided by citizen scientists for roadkill studies remains largely untested. This study used a dataset of 2 666 roadkill reports on national and regional roads in South Africa (total length ~170 000 km) over three years. We first compared roadkill data collected from trained road patrols operating on a major highway with data submitted by citizen scientists on the same road section (431 km). We found that despite minor differences, the broad spatial and taxonomic patterns were similar between trained reporters and untrained citizen scientists. We then compared data provided by two groups of citizen scientists across South Africa: 1) those working in the zoology/conservation sector (that we have termed ‘regular observers’, whose reports were considered to be more accurate due to their knowledge and experience), and 2) occasional observers, whose reports required verification by an expert. Again, there were few differences between the type of roadkill report provided by regular and occasional reporters; both types identified the same area (or cluster) where roadkill was reported most frequently. However, occasional observers tended to report charismatic and easily identifiable species more often than road patrols or regular observers. We conclude that citizen scientists can provide reliable data for roadkill studies when it comes to identifying general patterns and high-risk areas. Thus, citizen science has the potential to be a valuable tool for identifying potential roadkill hotspots and at-risk species across large spatial and temporal scales that are otherwise impractical and expensive when using standard data collection methodologies. This tool allows researchers to extract data and focus their efforts on potential areas and species of concern, with the ultimate goal of implementing effective roadkill-reduction measures.

VGI and crowdsourced data credibility analysis using spam email detection techniques

ABSTRACTVolunteered geographic information (VGI) can be considered a subset of crowdsourced data (CSD) and its popularity has recently increased in a number of application areas. Disaster management is one of its key application areas in which the benefits of VGI and CSD are potentially very high. However, quality issues such as credibility, reliability and relevance are limiting many of the advantages of utilising CSD. Credibility issues arise as CSD come from a variety of heterogeneous sources including both professionals and untrained citizens. VGI and CSD are also highly unstructured and the quality and metadata are often undocumented. In the 2011 Australian floods, the general public and disaster management administrators used the Ushahidi Crowd-mapping platform to extensively communicate flood-related information including hazards, evacuations, emergency services, road closures and property damage. This study assessed the credibility of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ushahidi CrowdMap dataset using a Naïve Bayesian network approach based on models commonly used in spam email detection systems. The results of the study reveal that the spam email detection approach is potentially useful for CSD credibility detection with an accuracy of over 90% using a forced classification methodology.

Crowdsourcing In-Situ Data on Land Cover and Land Use Using Gamification and Mobile Technology

Citizens are increasingly becoming involved in data collection, whether for scientific purposes, to carry out micro-tasks, or as part of a gamified, competitive application. In some cases, volunteered data collection overlaps with that of mapping agencies, e.g., the citizen-based mapping of features in OpenStreetMap. LUCAS (Land Use Cover Area frame Sample) is one source of authoritative in-situ data that are collected every three years across EU member countries by trained personnel at a considerable cost to taxpayers. This paper presents a mobile application called FotoQuest Austria, which involves citizens in the crowdsourcing of in-situ land cover and land use data, including at locations of LUCAS sample points in Austria. The results from a campaign run during the summer of 2015 suggest that land cover and land use can be crowdsourced using a simple protocol based on LUCAS. This has implications for remote sensing as this data stream represents a new source of potentially valuable information for the training and validation of land cover maps as well as for area estimation purposes. Although the most detailed and challenging classes were more difficult for untrained citizens to recognize, the agreement between the crowdsourced data and the LUCAS data for basic high level land cover and land use classes in homogeneous areas (ca. 80%) shows clear potential. Recommendations for how to further improve the quality of the crowdsourced data in the context of LUCAS are provided so that this source of data might one day be accurate enough for land cover mapping purposes.

A Crowd Content Analysis Assembly Line: Annotating Text Units of Analysis

Manual content analysis, also known as hand-coding or annotation, is often the only way to reliably identify important social phenomena in textual data. However, it is extremely time consuming, often requiring large teams of trained undergraduate research assistants working over several years. This article presents a new approach to manual content analysis (and software) enabling researchers to enlist the help untrained citizen scientists and crowd workers to label text through the internet. After first describing the dilemma of large-scale text analysis, the article explains how hand-coding for text units of analysis (TUAs) allows the work of a hand-coding project to be decomposed into micro-tasks fit for untrained crowd workers. The approach and software are explained in detail. Then, the article compares the new approach to similar fully-manual or fully-automated approaches, finding that it is less costly and four times faster than traditional manual content analysis, while producing richer and more transparent data than other approaches. The article then outlines a number of projects that might benefit from crowd content analysis, demonstrating its generalizability to an array of social science fields. And finally, it closes with a discussion of the specific limitations and general promise of this new approach.

Very brief training for laypeople in hands-only cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Effect of real-time feedback

BackgroundBystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) improves survival from out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, but rates and performance quality remain low. Although training laypeople is a primary educational goal, the optimal strategy is not well defined. This study aimed to determine whether a short training with real-time feedback was able to improve hands-only CPR among untrained citizens. MethodsOn the occasion of the 2015 World Heart Day and the European Restart a Heart Day, a pilot study involving 155 participants (81 laypeople, 74 health care professionals) was conducted. Participants were invited to briefly practice hands-only CPR on a manikin and were after evaluated during a 2-minute chest compression (CC) test. During training brief instructions regarding hand position, compression rate and depth according to the current guidelines were given and real-time feedback was provided by a Laerdal SkillReporting System. ResultsMean CC rate was significantly higher among health care professionals than among laypeople (119.07 ± 12.85 vs 113.02 ± 13.90 min−1; P = .006), although both met the 100-120 CC min−1 criterion. Laypeople achieved noninferior results regarding % of CC at adequate rate (51.46% ± 35.32% vs health care staff (55.97% ± 36.36%; P = .43) and depth (49.88% ± 38.58% vs 50.46% ± 37.17%; P = .92), % of CC with full-chest recoil (92.77% ± 17.17% vs 0.91% ± 18.84; P = .52), and adequate hand position (96.94% ± 14.78% vs 99.74 ± 1.98%; P = .11). The overall quality performance was greater than 70%, noninferior for citizens (81.23% ± 20.10%) vs health care staff (85.95% ± 14.78%; P = .10). ConclusionWith a very brief training supported by hands-on instructor-led advice and visual feedback, naïve laypeople are able to perform good-quality CC-CPR. Simple instructions, feedback, and motivation were the key elements of this strategy, which could make feasible to train big numbers of citizens.

Encouraging citizens to perform basic CPR: Potential usefulness of mobile phone applications

Purpose: Mortality rate of Out Hospital Cardiac Arrests (OHCA) remain high in our country despite the development of the 112. The cause of this is the low proportion of people who know basic CPR techniques. We need to use other ways for dissemination of these techniques. Multiple authors acknowledge the great development capability that allows Smartphones. They claim that these devices can improve resuscitation skills, in both health workers and untrained citizens with very low costs. Our main objective is to increase the intervention rate by witnesses in OHCA.

Citizen Journalism Just as Credible as Stories by Pros, Students Say

College students did not differentiate between the credibility of a news article that they were told was written either by a professional journalist or an untrained citizen. Students who trust the mainstream media assigned higher credibility to the news articles.

Safety of fully automatic external defibrillation by untrained lay rescuers in the presence of a bystander

Automated external defibrillators (AEDs) are becoming increasingly available in public places to be used by citizens in case of cardiac arrest. Most AEDs are semi-automatic (SAEDs), but some are fully automatic (FAEDs) and there is ongoing debate and concern that they may lead to inadvertent shocks to rescuers or bystanders because the timing of the shock is not controlled by the rescuer. We therefore compared the behaviour of untrained citizens using an FAED or an SAED in a simulated cardiac arrest scenario. One hundred and seventy-six laypeople were randomised to use an FAED or an SAED (Lifepak CR+, Medtronic, Redmond, USA) in a simulated cardiac arrest scenario on a manikin (Ambu, Denmark) where a bystander was touching the victim's upper arm. Each rescuer's performance was recorded on video and analysed afterwards using a modified Cardiff Score. The rescuer or the bystander was considered unsafe if either of them touched the victim during shock delivery. Eleven cases could not be analysed because of technical problems. Fifteen participants violated the protocol making further analysis impossible. Of the remaining 150 participants, 68 used the FAED and 82 used the SAED. The rescuers were safe in 97/150 (65%) cases, without a difference between FAED and SAED. The bystander was safe in 25/68 (37%) cases in the FAED group versus 19/82 (23%) in the SAED group (p=0.07). Combined safety of both rescuer and bystander was observed in 23/68 (34%) cases in the FAED group versus 15/82 (18%) in the SAED group (p=0.03). Safety was not compromised when untrained lay rescuers used an FAED compared with an SAED. The observation of overall safer behaviour by FAED users in the presence of bystanders may be related to the additional instructions provided by the FAED, and the reduced interaction of the rescuer with the bystander when using the SAED.

Collaborative monitoring of chlorine flavours in drinking water

Sensory data have always been used by concerned citizens to evaluate environmental variables within volunteer monitoring initiatives. The work presented in this paper intends to explore the possibility of using human sensory data as a source of information to monitor environmental quality variables within a public participation context. A case study that uses untrained citizens to monitor chlorine flavour of tap water is presented. Two collaborative monitoring tests were developed: (1) the one-sample one-trial test and (2) the Chlorine@Home test. The tests intended to address the participatory context required by collaborative monitoring initiatives. The development of the collaborative tests was supported by two tests that were designed for a laboratory context and explored sensory methodologies. The sensory tests implemented were: (1) the paired comparison test, (2) the forced-choice triangle test (ASTM Method E679-04). The collaborative experiments showed that the ability to detect chlorine flavours on a participatory context was independent on chlorine concentrations. The use of sensors by citizens may be a way to increase the credibility of the information. Nevertheless, this case study suggested that more research should be carried out to explore ways to involve citizens while increasing data reliability.

Geographical differences in cancer incidence in the Belgian province of Limburg

Correctly addressing the questions of worried citizens with respect to possible clusters of cancer occurrence requires a risk communication strategy that is informed by a previously established analytical procedure. The aim of this study was to analyse cancer registration data in order to identify municipalities or clusters of municipalities with an increased incidence of one or more cancer types, adjusted for background characteristics at the same level. Ideally, the approach is proactive, straightforward, and easy for untrained citizens to follow and imprecision effects are taken into account. For all municipalities and most cancers, all relevant calculations were performed proactively and all methods and decision thresholds were defined beforehand. For each municipality, standardised incidence ratios (SIRs) were calculated and smoothed using a Poisson-gamma (PG) and a conditional autoregressive (CAR) model. Clusters were confirmed using the Spatial scan statistic of Kulldorff. Identified clusters were tested for possible confounders using all information that was available for each municipality. The Limburg Cancer Registry, serving the population of the Belgian province of Limburg (n=781 759) was used. We identified a possible cluster of increased prostate cancer incidence (smoothed SIRs around 1.2) and a cluster of increased bladder cancer incidence in males that included seven municipalities with CAR-smoothed SIRs between 1.5 and 2.1. SIRs followed a more or less circular decrease around the centre that was situated in Alken and Hasselt, the provincial capital. Bladder cancer incidence was positively related to an index of socio-economic status (SES) per municipality. No relationship was found with the other indexes that were available. 82% of all bladder cancers were transitional cell carcinomas (TCC). A repeated analysis based on TCCs only resulted in similar results with CAR-smoothed relative risks that tended to be even higher in the cluster zone. A pre-emptive analysis of possible cancer incidence clustering on the municipality level proved to be feasible.