I am working with sixth grade students at Shumate Middle School through Jeff Bouwman's GLOBE Advisory program. The team I am working with decided to do the following for this year's IVSS and their involvement with the GLOBE Mission Mosquito Campaign:
1. They will research how mosquitoes transmit diseases.
2. They will find out which mosquito-transmitted diseases have been reported for their state and county for the past five years.
3. They will create a prediction for when active mosquito season will begin in their location using past active season data (derived from local authories- whom they will reach out to), their two years of air temperature (maximum, minumum, and average) and precipitation data that they have collected as a school using GLOBE protocols, as well as the data they will collect this year which will include air temperature, precipitation, and monthly GLOBE Observer Land Cover observations.
4. They will use the GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper tool weekly to collect data from around their school grounds. This data will mostly consist of identifying potential mosquito breeding habitats and eliminating them when possible.
5. They will plan to educate their school community about how to prevent being bitten by mosquitoes as well as how to reduce potential mosquito breeding habitats in the spring. They will share their data and predictions for the next active mosquito season during this "Get Ready for Mosquitoes" effort too.
6. They will plan to make larval traps to set out from March on in order to determine when mosquitoes are breeding in their school grounds. They will use this data and develop new questions that they can answer for the 2019-2020 school year when they plan to continue with their research and add the next steps- taking samples of larvae and identifying the species of larvae- to their investigative design.
You can see a sample spreadsheet showing the mosquito-related diseases found in my county and state for the past five years
here.
