Student Research Reports

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Citizen science is a minimally tapped resource which could exponentially decrease costs dedicated towards research. There are countless amounts of hours required to be invested towards specialized research such as Mosquito Habitat Mapping yet the amount of hours available are already limited due to the minimal amount of trained researchers. Funds can’t afford to train large amounts of volunteers, the most logical solution is to uncover when we can trust our Citizen Scientist’s observations. This study was conducted to test if an Experiential-Learning Model applies to Globe Observer Citizen Scientists, specifically Mosquito Habitat Mappers. Like many activities they are best learned through repetition and experience. Mosquito Habitat Mapping is tedious and it is expected that some data may not even be transferable. In order to validate the implementation of a more trusting Citizen Science procedure, research was conducted on the growth trends of ten users and their initial ten citizen mosquito habitat observations, to discover the minimal average amount of observations required for an individual citizen to output data with an accuracy score greater than 80%. After analyzing the accuracy of each individual observation and growth rate, it was discovered that a user will output an accuracy score of 80% or higher after 22 observations. Keywords: citizen scientists, mosquito habitat mapping, Globe Observer, experiential-learning model