Student Research Reports

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The goals of this project were to analyze citizen science data and use the findings to provide additional insight into one of the key contributors of mosquito population growth. During this investigation, researchers gathered mosquito larvae and land cover data from GLOBE Observer datasets, comparing the larvae population variance to determine the extent to which urban settings affect mosquito breeding. Socioeconomic and other environmental factors were not taken into consideration during the investigation. It was found that the association between urbanization and breeding varied greatly depending on the scope of the citizen science data gathered. Depending on the states filtered in the data access tool, the correlation coefficient ranged from 0.077 to 0.55. Overall, it can be concluded that citizen science is not consistent enough to prove an association between urbanization and mosquito breeding, which could be for a variety of reasons, including lurking variables that were not taken into account and the subjectiveness of data collection. To fix this issue, in the future, scientists could integrate NASA/government datasets with citizen science programs like GLOBE to increase the effectiveness of citizen science in research.