Citizen Science as a Tool for Transdisciplinary Research and Stakeholder
Engagement
Abstract
This presentation describes a vector-borne disease risk reduction
project conducted in Brazil and Peru as part of USAID’s Combating Zika
and Future Threats Initiative. The myriad factors contributing to vector
borne disease risk stem from interactions in a system that includes
local ecology and environmental parameters, urbanization, access to
health services, economic resources, human behavior, and the presence of
disease vectors and pathogens. The emergence of technologies such as
smart phones, cloud-based data servers, and data visualization and
analysis tools have fostered rapid growth in citizen science programs
and tools. The phenomenon of citizen science is seen by many as an
important sociocultural development that has the potential to
democratize science. While a number of citizen science projects may be
characterized as transdisciplinary research, in many cases stakeholder
engagement is limited to participation in crowd-sourced data collection.
In this project, the stakeholders- educators, students, community
leaders and public health officials- all contributed to the project at
levels of effort and in ways that were most meaningful for them. A key
innovation employed in this project was a mobile citizen science app
that enabled stakeholders to locate, identify and mitigate mosquito
breeding habitats. While there are many data collection apps that enable
citizen scientists to report environmental observations for use by the
science community, the NASA GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper also
enables users to tally their efforts as they eliminate mosquito
oviposition sites. This app capability supports municipalities keen on
promoting behaviors that reduce the risk of vector-borne disease. We
discuss the transdisciplinary approach employed through each phase of
the project: ideation, realization, experimentation and evaluation, and
how prioritizing local stakeholder knowledge and experience resulted in
recommendations that will be used to improve a citizen science app that
is employed internationally.