Forty species of ticks in Italyabout ten in the province of Trento alone, are more than sufficient to transmit viruses, bacteria and protozoa capable of affecting people and animals. The Edmund Mach Foundation has decided to tackle the problem with a new tool for our country, an app citizen science call ZeccAPPwhich turns anyone with a smartphone into a potential collaborator in entomological research.
How it works
The application, developed by the Agrometeorology and Irrigation Unit of the FEM Technology Transfer Centre, is available for iOS and Android. The simple mechanism sees the user photographs the mint and fills out a short survey which provides a series of information on the location, habitat, activities carried out and type of contact had with the parasite, then the images are then validated by Foundation experts and inserted on an interactive map accessible to all.
These are the words of Annapaola Rizzolihead of the Applied Ecology unit of the FEM Research and Innovation Centre:
The project aims not only to collect reports regarding the presence of ticks in the area, but also to disseminate useful information and strategies for health prevention”.
The app includes in-app photo guides, quick feedback on the images sent and a handbook on the behaviors to adopt to protect yourself from bites. Each report from a single user becomes, in practice, useful data for everyone else.
Why monitoring ticks is urgent
In Trentino the most widespread species is the woodland tick (Ixodes ricinus), also expanding due to climate change. It is the main local vector of pathogens, such as tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) virusthe Lyme borreliosistheanaplasmosis and the babesiosis. An often difficult diagnosis, which in the case of TBE can occur even without a direct bite, given that the infection is documented through the consumption of raw milk and derivatives from infected animals.
The distribution of risk is not uniform and FEM research shows how agricultural and forestry environments have different dynamics in the presence of pathogens. Also the most extreme climate events can come into play, such as the Vaia storm (a violent extratropical cyclone that hit Northern Italy hard in 2018), or the variations in pollen and seed production of some tree species which can alter the populations of rodents – main reservoirs of pathogens – with cascading effects on the risk of human infection.
A map that grows with everyone’s data
The strength of ZeccAPP lies in the data architecture, given that each validated report will feed into the diffusion and risk mapsalways updated in real time. Science, in this case, needs the numbers that only a widespread network of field observers can produce, and those observers are us ordinary citizens.
Here to download the application.
Source: fmach.it
