The number of tiger mosquito sightings reported via the Mosquito Alert app in the first half of 2020 is 70% higher than in 2018, which was, until now, the year with the most early-season sightings of the insect. However, 2015 still holds the record for the greatest number of tiger mosquito sightings over a full season.
The MosquitoAlertBCN project has been one of the research initiatives selected by the Pla Barcelona Ciència. It is a project led by CREAF, with the participation of UPF and IRIDEON and the collaboration of the ASPB. The Pla Barcelona Ciència has the support of the Barcelona City Council and the “la Caixa” Bank Foundation. Last Friday, February 7, the seven sectioned research initiatives were published on the 57 that were submitted to the call of the Pla Barcelona Science. Among the selected ones is MosquitoAlertBCN a project led by CREAF, which also involves Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), the IRIDEON technology company and the Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB). The event, chaired by the deputy mayor, Joan Subirats and Àngel Font, corporate director of Research and Strategy of the “la Caixa” Foundation, was attended by Frederic Bartumeus, ICREA researcher at CREAF and CEAB-CSIC, specialized in theoretical and computational ecology and John Palmer, professor at UPF, co-creator sociologist at Mosquito Alert, and Mark Richard Williams by IRIDEON, a leading company in the design and manufacture of intelligent mosquito traps. MosquitoAlertBCN will generate a network of citizens and smart traps around the city to monitoring and control in real time the tiger mosquito. The system will be integrated into the current management of mosquitoes that takes place in the city, with the participation of the Public Health Agency of Barcelona (ASPB) in the execution of the project. MosquitoAlertBCN will be a real time monitoring of the tiger mosquito The network of traps and citizens will allow quantifying the quantity and dynamics of tiger mosquito populations in real time, in the city of Barcelona, with unprecedented resolution and precision. The human-mosquito interaction will also be studied, by registering the bites, a very important factor in order to assess the risk of an epidemiological outbreak and improve epidemiological models. The objective of the project is to allow the city to better anticipate the risk of epidemiological outbreaks posed by the tiger mosquito in Barcelona through an open science model that could in the future be transferable to other Spanish and European cities. You can read more details about the project in the Mosquito Alert website.
Yew is considered a species of interest from the point of view of conservation for its small and isolated populations. An international team led by CREAF has studied the adaptive variation of their populations, a crucial knowledge to develop correct conservation measures.
CREAF, part of the consortium of the project, was the organizer of the event, which took place between November 25 and 27 at the Casa Convalescència in Barcelona, to deepen the challenges is facing the citizen science.
The Big Mosquito Bytes project has been awarded a million euros by the “la Caixa” Banking Foundation. The project will combine citizen science and other massive data sources to develop innovative models that allow predicting the risk of epidemics, as well as visualizing this risk in real time. In the project led by CEAB-CSIC, scientists from UPF, the Max Planck Institute for Demography, the National Center for Epidemiology of ISPCIII and CREAF participate, and it draws heavily on the Mosquito Alert citizen science platform.
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