Grant: Catalyst Grant: CPHO Report - General Pool

This project aims to be a foundation to facilitate community-based scientific research and promote greater public engagement in science while also providing opportunities for community members to gain new skills and knowledge in the scientific field. The objectives of the project are; to conduct a knowledge synthesis on different methods of citizen science approaches to mosquito surveillance for control of mosquito-borne diseases, its validity and sustainability, and the impacts of these methods in population health; to develop an adaptable toolkit for use across Canada that would provide key considerations and best practices for communities looking to implement a citizen science initiative for mosquito-borne disease surveillance. We will conduct a systematic review using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. This process will begin with defining the scope of our search, identifying key terms, and carrying out an extensive search of electronic databases, such as (but not limited to) Pubmed, social sciences abstracts, sociological abstracts, social sciences citation index, Scopus, Cochrane database of systematic reviews, and google scholar. We will also perform targeted searches for grey literature, including Google, and relevant discipline-based list serves and will use ProQuest to locate graduate (masters and Ph.D.) theses on relevant topics. We aim to create a toolkit that outlines best practices and steps for designing a citizen science mosquito project that could be carried out across Canada. The toolkit would be used by organizations considering enhancing their traditional mosquito surveillance program by developing a citizen science approach to mosquito surveillance in Canada. This toolkit would be developed based on a) contributions from an Expert Advisory Group (EAG) and b) data gathered from objective A- knowledge synthesis.