One Health and Citizen Science

Citizen Science to Expand One Health Community and Engage Stakeholders: What We Learned and What Is Next

Maurizio Ferri

DVM, Italian Veterinary Service

One Health is an holistic approach to livestock, human health, and environmental sustainability. As such, it needs to combine expertise across a range of social, environmental, veterinary, and medical sciences. The foundation of One Health comes from the Berlin principles, formulated in 2019 as an update to the Manhattan principles. The new principles aim to strengthen cross-sectoral and transdisciplinary health surveillance;?improve coordination of responses among governments, NGOs, healthcare organizations, academia, other institutions, industries, and other stakeholders; and integrate ecosystem health into One Health, while also addressing current pressing issues such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS and MERS indicate that to better operationalize the One Health approach, we need to overcome the dichotomy between the medical and veterinary professions and create a methodological convergence between One Health, and EcoHealth by engaging other professionals working on economic, natural and social?environments (e.g., conservationists, biologists, and social scientists) ?as well as nonprofessionals. EcoHealth and One Health challenge the traditional reductionism of biomedical approaches by placing animal and human health in their wider ecological context and devoting greater attention to the broader relationships among health and ecosystems, focusing on the environment and related socioeconomic systems.

COVID-19 pandemic signalled the need to overcome the current dichotomy between the medical and veterinary professions and create a methodological convergence between One Health, and EcoHealth

To understand better the complexity of socio-economic and ecological systems and operationalize the One Health concept, the One Health community has seen a remarkable expansion in the past decades from both the bottom up and the top down regarding the engagement of the civil society. The concept of inclusivity, which is at the heart of the One Health approach,?means engaging and working with stakeholders (e.g., health diplomacy and advocacy, private sector, academia, and national governments), including civil society and individuals to get their perspectives. The complex process of creating public health policy results in outputs that may appear not to link up to the public needs, address local priorities or empower local community-based organizations. This implies exploiting the opportunities represented by citizen science by using new participatory models to collaborate with nonprofessionals in conducting scientific research to prevent and solve relevant problems through the One Health approach. Due to the rapidly evolving world of social media, social networks, mobile applications,?citizen science allows the public to work in collaboration with experts in research projects functionally linked to policymaking and provide relevant information, ?ranging?from recorded observations, measuring local conditions, or notifying sightings of, for instance, wild animal species, etc...

What is Citizen Science?

There are many definitions of citizen science, which is an umbrella term for a range of strategies that directly involve members of the public as active contributors to scientific processes. Despite that it has been in use for over a century and evolved from a long tradition in fields, such as biodiversity, ecology, and meteorology (it was first developed to facilitate data collection, mainly in the natural sciences) it has only recently increased in popularity across multiple disciplines of research as a method of public engagement. ?Basically, the involvement of amateur volunteers and non-professionals in scientific research,?by a range of participatory (voluntary) models,?starts from their will to collaborate with scientists in the scientific process, by collecting data to produce new knowledge for science and society. Citizens can contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding relevant knowledge,?or?with?their?tools?and?resources, and as such, they provide benefits for scientists, policymakers, people, and the whole community. There are different citizen science forms, approaches, and methodologies, such as participatory action research, community-based participatory research, and action science.

Citizen science?was already applied more than a century ago: the first example seems to date back to 1900, when at the invitation of the National Audubon Society (United States), every Christmas, they contributed to the counting of birds (Christmas Bird Count).

Citizen science was dramatically enhanced by the exponential development of technologies (Internet of Things) and the way data, is collected,?processed, analyzed, and integrated with other data. ?The task of participants defines the type of citizen science projects that can include data collection and or/data analysis. ?In data collection projects, citizen scientists as contributors observe a situation or organism and collect data about it (this is called the popular epidemiology approach).?Data, including also personal health, the human microbiome, and pollution data,?is usually sent to a professional scientist or submitted to a database for automated analysis as part of the epistemic conversion to knowledge. ?In data-processing projects, data are moved from initial to analyzable states. ?A higher category?of active engagement of citizen scientists is the so-called co-creation, by which members of the public, with or without the involvement of a professional scientist, ?are engaged in most or all of the scientific inquiry process (community-led). ?These projects often take on a bottom-up or grass-roots structure and are a different approach from conventional science. According to Den Broeder et al.. 2016, ?citizen science as a community engagement strategy can be structured based on aims (investigation, education, promoting collective goods, and/or action), ?approaches (extreme citizen science, participatory citizen,?distributed intelligence crowdsourcing), ?and size (local versus mass ). In extreme citizen science, citizens lead the entire research process, while in participatory citizen science, citizens participate in problem definition and data collection.?

Citizen Science is not only prominent in research, and civil society but is also well recognized in political agendas, as reflected by the creation of the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) in 2013. ?Moreover, within the European Union (EU) program, ?COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology) action CA15212 is dedicated to Citizen Science to Promote Creativity, Scientific Literacy, and Innovation throughout Europe. The related report ‘The Science of Citizen Science, which concludes four years of intensive exchange within a dedicated European research network on citizen science, addresses the relationship between citizen science and topics such as policy, education, research quality, and data standardization.

Citizen Science is well placed in the EU institutional setting and has received substantial funding

The EU-Citizen.Science launched in 2019 provides a coordination and support platform with the goals of becoming the European reference point for citizen science through cross-network knowledge and the sharing on a multi-language repository website with access to projects and resources for all stakeholders.?The recent Joint Research Center (JRC) publication named ‘Activity report on Citizen Science - discoveries from a five years journey’, provides evidence-based scientific support to the European policy-making process and includes examples of a series of mobile apps related to Covid-19, ?invasive alien species Europe?and air quality. With the Alien Species Europe, app users can record pictures of?possible?invasive?alien species together?with?complementary?information?about?their observation. ?While the SenseEurAir app enables?amateurs and professionals alike to?receive?information?about?the?quality?of ambient?air?and?notifies?them?in?case?of a breach of pre-set pollution?thresholds.

One Health technology-enabled Citizen science approach

Citizen science is a promising practice for engaging with communities and operationalizing the One Health approach.?For instance, ?more than 50% of GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) data for biodiversity monitoring is obtained from citizen scientists. Citizen science integrates the participation of citizens in any project led by professionals, and medical and public health authorities, especially if zoonotic pathogens are detected. ?Such partnerships streamline the One Health/EcoHealth approach, where findings are used to help optimize the health of humans, captive and wild animals, plants, and the environment. ?Collecting data by lay people from a wide range of relevant sources, depending on the infectious disease threat is particularly useful in the field of infectious diseases and wildlife surveillance. Indeed, citizen scientists can play a key role in the spatial prediction of an emerging infectious disease and help predict the related risk.?Lay people’s?input, ?such as hobby farmers or bird watchers,?can also?be?helpful?for managing bird flu outbreaks and?environmental health monitoring.?With this purpose, ?SEANET (Seabird Ecological Assessment Network) was created to bring together interdisciplinary researchers and members of the public to identify and mitigate threats to seabirds that serve as indicators of the health of the marine ecosystem. ?Citizen science can facilitate the detection and recovery of carcasses of target species used as sentinels of infection, including for pathogens of significance to public or livestock health. Examples include two projects of incorporation of citizen science in wildlife surveillance based on the observation of mute swan (Cygnus olor) mortality for the detection of H5N1, highly pathogenic avian influenza, and corvid mortality for the detection of West Nile virus.?In Sweden invested volunteer groups (hunters) submit fox carcasses for Echinococcus multilocularis surveillance. There is also a web-based application created to record wildlife observations by citizens concerned about dead or sick wildlife called Wildlife Health Event Reporter.?The Versatile Emerging infectious disease Observatory (VEO) project in the framework of CORDIS Europe run by a consortium of twenty research partners in twelve European countries, by using epidemic intelligence, surveillance, and disease ecology, aims to develop a smart detection system for infectious disease outbreaks.?UE VEO is an iterative process between data science and technology experts, disease experts, social scientists, and citizen scientists. The researchers use laboratory research, field studies, and big data research to monitor and analyze various sources of information.?Data include human and animal health surveillance, health registries, microbial and viral genomic data (including next-generation sequencing), ?pathogen resistance data, mapping of vectors, climate and environmental data. In the One-Health domain, UE VEO supports mining, sharing, integration, presentation, and analysis of traditional and novel data sources, eg. both publicly available and confidential data on emerging infectious diseases and AMR, by public health actors and researchers. The consortium is set to investigate five outbreak scenarios (eg. disease transmitted by mosquitoes, from animals to humans (zoonosis)… including the disease X (the epidemic in waiting), which represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, ?and researchers need to come up with (new) ways to detect, control and treat it.

Collecting data by citizens from a wide range of relevant sources, depending on the infectious disease threat is particularly useful in the field of wildlife health surveillance

The One Health PACT in the Netherlands is a research collaboration of experts in a wide variety of fields relevant for infectious disease outbreaks, ranging from ecological and climate modeling to medical entomology, virology, and public health.?The Netherlands, ?due to its water-dominated landscape, dense humans and livestock population, and new mosquito species such as Aedes albopictus, is?vulnerable to outbreaks of viral diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.?The aim of OHPACT is to predict arboviruses using a proactive approach in the preparation for future outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases. Citizens are involved through multiple programs, like the Mosquito Alert via the Muggenradar platform, which is used by the general public to submit their perceived mosquito nuisance. ?Data is collected to gain insights into Spatio-temporal patterns of mosquito nuisance: in detail, mosquito numbers in the field will be compared to mosquito nuisance reports and by doing this, data can be cross-validated and patterns can be identified. ?Recent efforts are being made to allow the public to submit mosquito specimens caught indoors.

Citizen scientists can also contribute to providing arthropod vector data in the age of the so-called digital epidemiology,?useful for studies of vector-borne disease.?An example comes from North America where tick-borne diseases are increasing. The knowledge of tick species and associated human pathogens can inform the public and medical community about the risk for tick bites and tick-borne infections. Citizen science can be used to collect physical tick specimens and digital images for identification by professional entomologists, along with data where the tick species and life stage were identified.

One Health can also be integrated with citizen science to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by focusing on integrating human, animal, and environmental health factors.?It is worth mentioning the project, run by the Childhood Infections and Pollution Consortium (CHIP) in low-and middle-income countries like India, Indonesia, and Chile, ?designed to reduce the burden of childhood infections and AMR?in urban slums. CHIP is composed of interdisciplinary academics, healthcare professionals, veterinarians, international and local non-governmental organizations, current and former policymakers, local artists, and community champions, among others.??In?low-and-middle-income countries, childhood infections are caused by respiratory, vector-borne, and gastrointestinal viruses, parasites, and bacteria, including cholera, and are associated with high mortality. There is a variety of contributing factors, ?like overcrowding, inadequate access to safe water, and sanitation, livestock in close proximity, poor housing. In these conditions antibiotics are the only treatment available in low-resource settings, however, poor regulatory governance and antibiotic misuse among these populations are leading to a widespread increase in AMR. Through co-producing integrated, low-cost behavioral and slum-upgrading interventions using a One Health approach,?community members, public, and private sector actors can use One Health technology-enabled citizen science to identify factors leading to infectious diseases and AMR. ?Methods and?approaches include social mapping, interviews in urban slums, geo-tagged action cameras in walks to observe potential infection pathways, ?as well as social-cultural aspects of each community, detailed map of slum-level variables with residents.?All information is digitized and mapped in preparation for utilizing technology-enabled citizen science methods in the future. The mapping produced summarizes the complex relationships investigated among humans, the environment, and animals and serves as a roadmap that will be iteratively updated to identify research questions and design interventions to reduce this infection and AMR burden.?In Italy, there is no shortage of citizen science projects, ?although not yet structured in a network.?Italy hosted the First Italian Citizen Science Conference in Rome in November 2017, organized by the Italian National Academy of Sciences with the support of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) with the aim to explore the state of the art in this relatively new, promising field. ?Also, the third International ECSA Conference 2020 was held in Trieste. The?CNBF (National Center of Forest Biodiversity) runs the LIFE citizen science projects to monitor?insects with public participation?(MIPP): every person may become a citizen scientist and collect faunistic data on five target beetle species throughout Italy.?The project aims to develop standard methods for monitoring the conservation status of the five target beetle species. Citizen Science Italia is an informal group of citizen science scientists and supporters in Italy and manages a public space for sharing existing initiatives divided by categories: biodiversity, marine biology, pollinator, insects, waters, alien species, mosquitoes.

Citizen science in the time of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has called for rapid, interdisciplinary scientific studies and innovative methods of data collection. In this context, Citizen science has been used to collect health information from individuals and provided the most extensive coverage and participation numbers that were otherwise impossible.??A study was run in the UK to track Covid-19 symptoms using the Smartphone Zoe COVID Symptom, an app that contributed, ?for example, ?to the identification of anosmia as a key symptom of Covid-19 in general (in May 2020) and to provide a wider picture of likely infection levels.??

Final remarks?

Despite the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic has shone a light on the extreme precariousness of our infrastructure, governance, and communities in times of public health emergency nevertheless has led to positive transformational changes in science and fosterred unprecedented collaboration among scientists.?Covid-19 being rooted in interlinks of animals, humans, and?the environment?provides a great opportunity within the One Health perspective for multidisciplinary collaboration between the public health sector and the stakeholders. ?By leveraging the engagement of the latter, the One Health community has many opportunities to expand and promote its message and finally incorporate citizen science.?Undoubtedly, citizen science within different forms and operational contexts is a key element in the One Health approach to better understand the complex socio-ecological systems. ?The interactive nature of social media, increasing global internet access, Internet of Things, Cloud, and cognitive computing have shown great potential in citizen science projects to transform the concept of participation when dealing with data collection and interpretation.

The One Health community by leveraging on the engagement of stakeholders and incorporating Citizen Science can take on board different perspectives and reach consensus on solutions to health and environmental problems.

Citizen science can instill a sense of ownership of the policy and regulatory measures to tackle current and future public health emergencies. Unfortunately, however, the One Health technology-enabled citizen science approach will have to face some challenges related to ethics, gender dimensions, management of intellectual property, as well as digital platforms and data management, the robustness, and by extension, the validity of the scientific results.?Moreover, the lack of funding can hamper the quality assurance of citizen science projects and can have knock-on consequences for the multidisciplinary nature of citizen science.?Since 2011 several citizen science projects have been supported by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) as well as under Horizon 2020, however citizen science still needs to be consolidated in national research programs, and funding programs for policy-oriented citizen science remain largely limited to a few areas that have never been occupied by ‘professional science’ (e.g. biodiversity monitoring). ?The hope is that in the forthcoming Horizon Europe (2021–2027), which among other developments calls for higher interdisciplinary, more inclusiveness, and full openness of research, citizen science approaches are recognized as being an important element in support of this strategy and that related funding calls could contribute to shaping it in the future.