Using volunteered observations to map human exposure to ticks

Abstract

Lyme borreliosis (LB) is the most prevalent tick-borne disease in Europe and its incidence has steadily increased over the last two decades. In the Netherlands alone, more than 20,000 citizens are affected by LB each year. Because of this, two Dutch citizen science projects were started to monitor tick bites. Both projects have collected nearly 50,000 geo-located tick bite reports over the period 2006–2016. The number of tick bite reports per area unit is a proxy of tick bite risk. This risk can also be modelled as the result of the interaction of hazard (e.g. tick activity) and human exposure (e.g. outdoor recreational activities). Multiple studies have focused on quantifying tick hazard. However, quantifying human exposure is a harder task. In this work, we make a first step to map human exposure to ticks by combining tick bite reports with a tick hazard model. Our results show human exposure to tick bites in all forested areas of the Netherlands. This information could facilitate the cooperation between public health specialists and forest managers to create better mitigation campaigns for tick-borne diseases, and it could also support the design of improved plans for ecosystem management.

Gender-based pairings influence cooperative expectations and behaviours

“…Moving the laboratory 'into the wild' 38 can overcome the excess of seclusion of controlled laboratory settings of much behavioural research. It is also in line with citizen science principles 39,40 which are increasingly encouraging the opening up of scientific research and practices to the general public [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49] : from the research design, to the data collection, and the interpretation of the results.…”

Modelling tick bite risk by combining random forests and count data regression models

“…(b) Class 1 in this map correspond to the classes from (a), class 2 represents tick bites reported outside forests, class 3 represents forests with no tick bites recorded, and class 4 shows locations where no tick bites were reported during the study period. These results can be found in (Garcia-Marti et al, 2018), and we cross them with the tick bite risk maps obtained in this work to explore the risk per human exposure category (Figure 9). Figure 6.…”

Large-scale citizen science provides high-resolution nitrogen dioxide values and health impact while enhancing community knowledge and collective action

“…Recent articles illustrate how crowdsourced citizen science data can elucidate opportunity costs and large spatiotemporal representations including: conservation efforts of fisheries [45], migratory birds species [46], biodiversity in general [47,48], mosquito and other organisms control from a public health perspective [49][50][51], human mobility patterns [52] or earthquake locations [53]. These examples, among others, consider and evaluate collective spatial coverage and mapping in one way or another.…”