Mosquito-borne diseases continue to ravage humankind with >700 million infections and nearly one million deaths every year. Yet only a small percentage of the >3500 mosquito species transmit diseases, necessitating both extensive surveillance and precise identification. Unfortunately, such efforts are costly, time-consuming, and require entomological expertise. As envisioned by the Global Mosquito Alert Consortium, citizen science can provide a scalable solution. However, disparate data standards across existing platforms have thus far precluded truly global integration. Here, utilizing Open Geospatial Consortium standards, we harmonized four data streams from three established mobile apps—Mosquito Alert, iNaturalist, and GLOBE Observer’s Mosquito Habitat Mapper and Land Cover—to facilitate interoperability and utility for researchers, mosquito control personnel, and policymakers. We also launched coordinated media campaigns that generated unprecedented numbers and types of observations, including successfully capturing the first images of targeted invasive and vector species. Additionally, we leveraged pooled image data to develop a toolset of artificial intelligence algorithms for future deployment in taxonomic and anatomical identification. Ultimately, by harnessing the combined powers of citizen science and artificial intelligence, we establish a next-generation surveillance framework to serve as a united front to combat the ongoing threat of mosquito-borne diseases worldwide.

Citizen science is a form of public participation in scientific research where volunteer members of the public and research scientists collaborate to address real world problems (Bonney et al., 2009(Bonney et al., , 2014Shirk et al., 2012). In the last decade, participatory research projects have grown in popularity with the public, with millions of people volunteering on projects every year (Bowser et al., 2020;Callaghan et al., 2019). Increasingly, scientists are using citizen science data in their research that spans biological conservation to mapping galaxies (McKinley et al., 2017;Shanley, 2020). Recently, the value of the volume, velocity, and variety of data created by non-specialist volunteers using personal mobile devices has also attracted the attention of public health researchers (Katapally, 2020;Wang et al., 2019). When it comes to pandemics,

This technical report summarizes the GLOBE Observer data set from 1 April 2016 to 1 December 2019. GLOBE Observer is an ongoing NASA‐sponsored international citizen science project that is part of the larger Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, which has been in operation since 1995. GLOBE Observer has the greatest number of participants and geographic coverage of the citizen science projects in the Earth Science Division at NASA. Participants use the GLOBE Observer mobile app (launched in 2016) to collect atmospheric, hydrologic, and terrestrial observations. The app connects participants to satellite observations from Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO, GOES, Himawari, and Meteosat. Thirty‐eight thousand participants have contributed 320,000 observations worldwide, including 1,000,000 georeferenced photographs. It would take an individual more than 13 years to replicate this effort. The GLOBE Observer app has substantially increased the spatial extent and sampling density of GLOBE measurements and more than doubled the number of measurements collected through the GLOBE Program. GLOBE Observer data are publicly available (at http://observer.globe.gov).

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This technical report summarizes the GLOBE Observer data set from 1 April 2016 to 1 December 2019. GLOBE Observer is an ongoing NASA-sponsored international citizen science project that is part of the larger Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, which has been in operation since 1995. GLOBE Observer has the greatest number of participants and geographic coverage of the citizen science projects in the Earth Science Division at NASA. Participants use the GLOBE Observer mobile app (launched in 2016) to collect atmospheric, hydrologic, and terrestrial observations. The app connects participants to satellite observations from Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO, GOES, Himawari, and Meteosat. Thirty-eight thousand participants have contributed 320,000 observations worldwide, including 1,000,000 georeferenced photographs. It would take an individual more than 13 years to replicate this effort. The GLOBE Observer app has substantially increased the spatial extent and sampling density of GLOBE measurements and more than doubled the number of measurements collected through the GLOBE Program. GLOBE Observer data are publicly available (at observer.globe.gov).Plain Language Summary GLOBE Observer is a NASA citizen science mobile application ("app") that gives anyone with a smartphone or tablet the opportunity to share what they see in the sky and on the landscape around them. GLOBE Observer is available for free from Google Play and the Apple App Store. Since 2016, tens of thousands of people around the world have taken hundreds of thousands of observations. An individual scientist would have to work non-stop for more than 13 years to make the same number of observations. All of the data sent through GLOBE Observer go into a worldwide database that's made freely available to everyone (at observer.globe.gov). This article describes how the GLOBE Observer app works and shows what 3 years of data look like.