Citizen Science and Community Engagement in Tick Surveillance—A Canadian Case Study

Abstract

Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne disease in North America and Europe, and on-going surveillance is required to monitor the spread of the tick vectors as their populations expand under the influence of climate change. Active surveillance involves teams of researchers collecting ticks from field locations with the potential to be sites of establishing tick populations. This process is labor- and time-intensive, limiting the number of sites monitored and the frequency of monitoring. Citizen science initiatives are ideally suited to address this logistical problem and generate high-density and complex data from sites of community importance. In 2014, the same region was monitored by academic researchers, public health workers, and citizen scientists, allowing a comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each type of surveillance effort. Four community members persisted with tick collections over several years, collectively recovering several hundred ticks. Although deviations from standard surveillance protocols and the choice of tick surveillance sites makes the incorporation of community-generated data into conventional surveillance analyses more complex, this citizen science data remains useful in providing high-density longitudinal tick surveillance of a small area in which detailed ecological observations can be made. Most importantly, partnership between community members and researchers has proven a powerful tool in educating communities about of the risk of tick-vectored diseases and in encouraging tick bite prevention.

The Spatial Distribution of Dermacentor Ticks (Ixodidae) in Germany—Evidence of a Continuing Spread of Dermacentor reticulatus

“…Since the turn of the millennium, the distribution of D. reticulatus in Germany has been the subject of several studies, especially with regard to its increased spread (1,13,32,35,36). As compared to field studies or literature surveys, studies involving citizens can cover a wider spatial extent and result in a larger number of records (37,38), although the quality of the obtained data can be variable. In the current study, only records presumably reflecting the true occurrence of the tick species, i.e., those assigned to a high or medium geographic accuracy, were taken into account for distribution maps.…”

“…Since the turn of the millennium, the distribution of D. reticulatus in Germany has been the subject of several studies, especially with regard to its increased spread ( 1 , 13 , 32 , 35 , 36 ). As compared to field studies or literature surveys, studies involving citizens can cover a wider spatial extent and result in a larger number of records ( 37 , 38 ), although the quality of the obtained data can be variable.…”

Monitoring Risk: Tick and Borrelia burgdorferi Public Participatory Surveillance in the Canadian Maritimes, 2012–2020

“…However, active surveillance does permit precise geographical location of recovered ticks, recording of ecosystem variables and has the advantage of allowing direct comparison of tick density between populations as search effort is not influenced by proximity to human communities so it is valuable for ecological studies in endemic areas [ 36 ]. Passive collection, often involving a community science approach, is able to collect more ticks over a larger geographic area with fewer logistical challenges than active surveillance [ 37 ]. Passive surveillance has been criticized for being too sensitive as it can recover both endemic ticks from local populations and adventitious ticks dropped outside of endemic areas by migratory animals [ 34 ].…”

Are Orienteers Protected Enough against Tick Bites? Estimating Human Exposure to Tick Bites through a Participative Science Survey during an Orienteering Competition

“…Mass-participation events, ideally suited to engage citizens in science [ 25 , 29 ], provide a unique opportunity to obtain such quantitative data by providing a large sample of data on people in the same environment at the same time. Using a citizen science approach can not only provide a large sample of data that would have been difficult to collect, but this is also a good way to improve tick-borne disease prevention among contributors [ 40 , 41 , 42 ].…”