Mosquito Mapper: a phone application to map urban mosquitoes

This paper presents mosquito mapper: an android phone application created with the goal of giving science-driven citizens the means to monitor mosquito populations in an urban environment. Mosquito mapper allows the recording of mosquito encounters as well as conditions surrounding the encounter. It also features a rudimentary identification tool. The goal of the application is to create a database and construct a map of the encounters free to consult for citizens and scientists. Such database constitutes a necessary first step for the development of useful management strategies addressing potential human health threats induced by mosquitoes. The citizen scientist may voluntarily provide other additional information on the circumstances of the encounter that may contain scientifically useful information. We describe the current features of the application, discuss their strength, limits, potential scientific value and suggest possible future extensions. The original city for which the application was developed is Berlin, Germany, but the application is coded in such a way that it is easily applicable to any urban environment.


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Every day, more than 2.5 exabytes of digital data are generated from internet use (Gantz & Reinsel 26 2013). Most of these data are generated by the general public and are the primary target of 27 companies dealing with big data. User-generated data can also be of great use for scientific 28 purposes . A field of technologically-aided citizen science is now emerging ). These inaccuracies can originate from human use but also directly from the devices used 38 for monitoring. But using the large amount of data that smartphone applications may potentially 39 gather constitutes a promising way to temper the inherent inaccuracy that comes from dealing with 40 untrained people using different instruments (Cohn 2008). Furthermore, citizen scientists may 41 provide information at a scale virtually impossible to obtain from regular collection and therefore 42 help the scientific community tackle usually difficult questions (Conrad & Hilchey 2011). 43 Here, we suggest using the power of citizen science to tackle the growing threats posed by 44 mosquitoes. Mosquitoes typically constitute a nuisance in urban environments, a nuisance that may 45 become a threat due to globalisation and climate change as diseases carried by mosquito may spread 46 significantly faster if they enter a big centre of urbanisation Brown et al. 47 2008). Monitoring the extent to which mosquitoes are encountered in urban environments 48 constitutes a necessary first step for the creation of successful management .

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The use of citizen science can provide a quick and cheap way of gathering such information (Cohn  Ultimately, such user-created database may be useful for drafting urban management policies 64 regarding mosquitoes or be used to cast a "mosquito forecast" in the like of current weather forecast. to the project, acknowledges helpers and supplies contact information. The "identify" button brings 75 a user through a short identification key. Finally, the "locate" button brings up the current user's 76 location followed by a short questionnaire. All information provided by a user is sent as a JSON 77 file to a database. A user can either locate or identify the encounter, but is encouraged to do both.

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The intended use of the application, that we call an "experiment" for simplicity, follows this scheme.

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The user opens the application, chooses whether they want to locate or identify an encounter, then Locate activity 84 By tapping the locate button, the users are returned their current position, then asked to proceed.

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The "locate" activity uses the system location service of Android. This service is standard across 86 Android distributions and is accessed by the application upon authorization of the user. The 87 application is therefore given access to the location device of the mobile phone (generally not the 88 device's GPS, the application uses various location sources) to provide the user's coordinates.

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Upon starting the "locate" activity, the application creates an instance of "locate manager" and an

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Upon completion of this activity, the last latitude and longitude recorded is given a unique ID and 97 sent to our server. 98 We decided to make this activity quick to access and finish because location is the feature we deem 99 the most crucial. After recording the encounter, the user is asked a few questions concerning their 100 surrounding environment and to take a picture of the mosquito. By the end of the "locate" activity, 101 the user is asked whether they want to proceed with an identification or end the experiment.

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Identify activity 103 By tapping the identify button, the user is sent to a simplified identification key ( Figure 2). The 104 goal of this key is to 1) ensure that the encountered organism is a mosquito, 2) estimate which 105 subfamily the mosquito belongs to and 3) determine whether the encountered mosquito is male or 106 female. Upon completion of this activity, the answers given are tagged with a unique ID and sent 107 to our server. If the locate activity has been performed before, the ID for identification is linked 108 with the one for the location. 109 We decided to restrict ourselves to such a low level of identification because inner city Berlin is  With this alpha release, all information and pictures are sent to a private server, by downloading 138 the application, users agree to provide us with the data and give us the right to store it for scientific 139 purposes. The type of data collected and the moment they are collected is detailed in Figure 3. They our data will strongly depend on the frequency and the amount of recorded encounters.

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The main use of our application will probably remain limited to the city of Berlin were we have 160 the capacity to advertise our work on a regular basis to an interested audience. The use of Mosquito

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Mapper on larger scale, however useful it may be, would rely on time investment from other people.

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Developing a smartphone application for big data seems to come with a lot of uncertainties. Before 163 such endeavour is widely adopted, there is a great possibility that our work produces little useful 164 studies. However, because such application can remain dormant at little to no cost, we believe it 165 offers scientists a great opportunity to study mosquitoes in a way that can be both cheap and The alpha release of the application is meant to showcase the possibilities of citizen-driven data 195 collection with the help of smartphones. By trying to make the data collection as easy and fast as 196 possible, our aim is to allow children to take part. As a result, we wish to add features to make the 197 application more "fun" to use. One way to do this is to gamify the application which means adding 198 8 game-like features that would make using the application more engaging. We envision this process 199 as follows: each use of the application would generate experience points that would lead the user 200 to change levels. We will then add a leader board where users could compare their performance to 201 others. Another direction for gamification will be the addition of badges for certain behaviour such 202 as identifying a certain amount of mosquitoes or with a certain regularity. Developing the 203 application to be more game-like implies various changes to the way the database is currently 204 structured that would make the application more lightweight but would also consume more mobile 205 data.

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A big issue of the program is that it consists of a presence-only dataset that is known to suffer from