Estudi de les tendències de participació i els perfils d’usuaris dins del projecte AtrapaelTigre.com sobre el monitoratge del mosquit tigre (Aedes albopictus)

Abstract

The tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) is a species native to Southeast Asia and it was first detected in Catalonia in 2004 and currently has colonized all over the peninsula. In addition, this species of mosquito has the ability to act as a vector of several diseases, such as malaria, dengue and Chikungunya. Thus, it is an invasive species of ecology and urban habitats, which hinders its eradication and enhances the capacity to transmit diseases to the human population. ICREA Movement Ecology Laboratory in collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Studies of Blanes CEAB-CSIC and the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF) have developed a new application called Tigatrapp in which citizens can send pictures of Tiger Mosquito or breeding sites from their smart phone and this information is automatically shown in an interactive map on the website. This allows us to establish a closer link between the participants and the scientific world, because citizens have the possibility to cooperate in locating tiger mosquito in order to model the dispersion, and provide new insights into scientific research. This project is based on statistical analysis to determine the behaviours that users follow when they have downloaded the application, also with the complementation of different methods of analysis to classify participants into groups of similar profiles. The aim of this study is to understand the trends of participation and determine whether the citizen science is really a useful tool for active control of mosquitoes providing continuous and important data throughout this project called AtrapaelTigre.com. To fulfil this, it is essential to determine possible weaknesses and possible issues to improve so as to encourage the citizens’ participation. The study is based on two fundamental databases which have been extracted from the application server that contains data from 13rd of June, which corresponds to the day on which the application is available, until 1st of December 2014. All of the reports and users are analyzed through statistical programs in order to achieve objectives