News - University of Arkansas
Scientists Are Asking for Your Mosquito Habitat Mapper Data! Read Recent GLOBE STEM Professionals Blog
A recent blog, written by Dr. Rusty Low (GLOBE Mission Mosquito Science Lead), discusses how The GLOBE Program’s App, GLOBE Observer (GO), is partnering with several new science projects.
“Two projects have adopted the GO Mosquito Habitat Mapper tool as a way to obtain data for scientific analysis. The GLOBE Mission Mosquito Campaign plays an official role in a research project funded by the National Science Foundation: Citizen Epidemiology: Designing and Connecting Next-Generation Cyber, Biological, and Citizen Science Systems for the Surveillance and Control of Mosquito-Borne Diseases. The project PI is Dr. Ryan Carney, University of South Florida,” Low explains in the blog.
“To create an automated larva identification using artificial intelligence, many images of mosquito larvae are needed- from all angles. Mosquito Habitat Mappers can help support this work by submitting larvae photographs using the GLOBE Observer app. Remember that you can take up to 9 photos. Dr. Carney, with Dr. Chellappan, are developing the AI larvae recognition software. They would like to see as many as you have time to make, including the entire body, tail segments, as well as head, thorax, and abdomen. Using your toothpick, roll your specimen around and get several angles- the challenge is always trying to represent our 3-D organism in flat 2-D images, which is why one photo is rarely enough!”
“Besides collecting the larvae photos, Dr. Carney also needs land cover photos that correspond to the place where you find mosquito habitats. This is the beauty of the GLOBE Observer app: The Land Cover tool is handy, and this task will take less than 5 minutes. You don't need to do the classification step in the land cover protocol (the second step); however, the six photos from the first data collection step that corresponds to the mosquito breeding site location would add valuable data for our scientists.”
To read the entire blog, and see the video created by Dr. Carney and Dr. Chellappan on the AI model they are developing, as well as how the GO Mosquito Habitat Mapper has been adopted as a data collection tool by Ethiopian entomologists, click here.
News origin: GLOBE Implementation Office