Scaling Up: Citizen Science Engagement and Impacts Beyond the Individual

Knowledge, attitudes and practices about air pollution and its health effects in 6th to 11th-grade students in Colombia: a cross-sectional study

Introduction

Globally, air pollution is the leading environmental cause of disease and premature death. Raising awareness through environmental education and adequate communication on air quality could reduce the adverse effects. We aimed to assess the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding air pollution and health and determine the factors associated with these KAP in children and adolescents.

Methods

In 2019-2020, a cross-sectional study was conducted on 6th-11th grade high school students in five municipalities in Colombia. Variables collected included: age, sex, private or public school, any medical history, emergency room visits due to respiratory symptoms in the last year, and whether students played sports. The main exposure was the School Environmental Project. The outcomes were the KAP scale [0% (the lowest score) to 100% (the highest score)]. The factors associated with KAP levels were evaluated with independent mixed regressions due to the multilevel structure of the study (level 1: student; level 2: school), and the exponential coefficients (95% confidence interval-CI) were reported.

Results

Among 1,676 students included, 53.8% were females. The median knowledge score about air pollution and its health effects was 33.8% (IQR: 24.0-44.9), 38.6% knew the air quality index, 30.9% knew the air quality alerts that occurred twice a year in these municipalities and 5.3% had high self-perceived knowledge. Positive attitudes, pro-environmental practices, being female, grade level, attending a private school, having respiratory diseases, and the school environmental project importance were associated with higher knowledge scores. The median attitudes score was 78.6% (IQR: 71.4-92.9). Pro-environmental attitudes were associated with knowledge-increasing, being female, attending a private school, and the school environmental project. The median pro-environmental practices score was 28.6% (IQR: 28.6-42.9). During air quality alerts, 11.6% had worn masks, 19% had reduced the opening time of windows and 15.9% avoided leaving home. Pro-environmental practices were associated with knowledge-increasing and attitudes-increasing, and lower practices with higher grade levels, visiting a doctor in the last year, and practicing sports.

Discussion

Children and adolescents have low knowledge scores and inadequate pro-environmental practices scores regarding air pollution. However, they demonstrate positive attitudes towards alternative solutions and express important concerns about the planet's future.

A scoping review of wildfire smoke risk communications: issues, gaps, and recommendations

BACKGROUND

Wildfire smoke exposure has become a growing public health concern, as megafires and fires at the wildland urban interface increase in incidence and severity. Smoke contains many pollutants that negatively impact health and is linked to a number of health complications and chronic diseases. Communicating effectively with the public, especially at-risk populations, to reduce their exposure to this environmental pollutant has become a public health priority. Although wildfire smoke risk communication research has also increased in the past decade, best practice guidance is limited, and most health communications do not adhere to health literacy principles: readability, accessibility, and actionability. This scoping review identifies peer-reviewed studies about wildfire smoke risk communications to identify gaps in research and evaluation of communications and programs that seek to educate the public.

METHODS

Four hundred fifty-one articles were identified from Web of Science and PubMed databases. After screening, 21 articles were included in the final sample for the abstraction process and qualitative thematic analysis. Ten articles were based in the US, with the other half in Australia, Canada, Italy, and other countries. Fifteen articles examined communication materials and messaging recommendations. Eight papers described communication delivery strategies. Eleven articles discussed behavior change. Six articles touched on risk communications for vulnerable populations; findings were limited and called for increasing awareness and prioritizing risk communications for at-risk populations.

RESULTS

This scoping review found limited studies describing behavior change to reduce wildfire smoke exposure, characteristics of effective communication materials and messaging, and communication delivery strategies. Literature on risk communications, dissemination, and behavior change for vulnerable populations was even more limited.

CONCLUSIONS

Recommendations include providing risk communications that are easy-to-understand and adapted to specific needs of at-risk groups. Communications should provide a limited number of messages that include specific actions for avoiding smoke exposure. Effective communications should use mixed media formats and a wide variety of dissemination strategies. There is a pressing need for more intervention research and effectiveness evaluation of risk communications about wildfire smoke exposure, and more development and dissemination of risk communications for both the general public and vulnerable populations.

The case for citizen science in public health policy and practice: a mixed methods study of policymaker and practitioner perspectives and experiences

BACKGROUND

Citizen science (CS) is increasingly being utilised to involve the public in public health research, but little is known about whether and how CS can address the needs of policy and practice stakeholders in health promotion and chronic disease prevention.

METHODS

Using a mixed methods approach we conducted an online survey (n = 83) and semi-structured interviews (n = 21) with policy and practice stakeholders across Australia to explore how CS approaches are perceived and applied in chronic disease prevention, how CS aligns with existing approaches to community engagement, and how the uptake of CS can be supported within policy and practice settings.

RESULTS

Most participants had heard of CS, and while few had experience of using CS, there was widespread support for this approach, with many seeing it as complementary to other community engagement approaches. CS was seen as providing: (a) a robust framework for engagement; (b) access to rich data; (c) opportunities for more meaningful engagement; and (d) a mutually beneficial approach for stakeholders and community members. However, stakeholders identified a need to weigh benefits against potential risks and challenges including competing organisational priorities, resourcing and expertise, data quality and rigour, governance, and engagement.

CONCLUSIONS

To expand the use of CS, stakeholders identified the need for increased awareness, acceptance, and capacity for CS within public health organisations, greater access to supporting tools and technology, and evidence on processes, feasibility and impacts to enhance the visibility and legitimacy of CS approaches.

Citizen science: How to extend reciprocal benefits from the project community to the broader socio-ecological system

Quantitative plant biology is a growing field, thanks to the substantial progress of models and artificial intelligence dealing with big data. However, collecting large enough datasets is not always straightforward. The citizen science approach can multiply the workforce, hence helping the researchers with data collection and analysis, while also facilitating the spread of scientific knowledge and methods to volunteers. The reciprocal benefits go far beyond the project community: By empowering volunteers and increasing the robustness of scientific results, the scientific method spreads to the socio-ecological scale. This review aims to demonstrate that citizen science has a huge potential (i) for science with the development of different tools to collect and analyse much larger datasets, (ii) for volunteers by increasing their involvement in the project governance and (iii) for the socio-ecological system by increasing the share of the knowledge, thanks to a cascade effect and the help of 'facilitators'.

Tackling the emerging threat of antifungal resistance to human health

Invasive fungal infections pose an important threat to public health and are an under-recognized component of antimicrobial resistance, an emerging crisis worldwide. Across a period of profound global environmental change and expanding at-risk populations, human-infecting pathogenic fungi are evolving resistance to all licensed systemic antifungal drugs. In this Review, we highlight the main mechanisms of antifungal resistance and explore the similarities and differences between bacterial and fungal resistance to antimicrobial control. We discuss the research and innovation topics that are needed for risk reduction strategies aimed at minimizing the emergence of resistance in pathogenic fungi. These topics include links between the environment and One Health, surveillance, diagnostics, routes of transmission, novel therapeutics and methods to mitigate hotspots for fungal adaptation. We emphasize the global efforts required to steward our existing antifungal armamentarium, and to direct the research and development of future therapies and interventions.

Online Community and Citizen Science supports environmental science learning by young people

Community and citizen science in online settings could be seen as a means for young people to engage with and contribute to authentic science. Yet, there is a limited understanding of who takes part in citizen science among young people, what they learn, and through which processes, particularly in online settings. In this exploratory study, we analysed 34 in-depth interviews and log files of young people aged 11-19 years old who took part in citizen science projects, hosted on the Zooniverse platform. Data analysis suggested that participation in online citizen science can bring environmental science learning benefits to young people, with some participants reporting evidence of agency with science, highlighted by taking action to do science in another context. Many participating youth exhibited substantial previous science experiences that helped them to take part and learn from citizen science projects. Considering findings from this study, we present a first working framework of how environmental science learning is enabled or hindered by certain types of participation, as a means to guide the design of online citizen science for young people. We recommend that the future project design, publicity and recruitment in online citizen science activities explicitly target the needs and interests of young people with diverse characteristics and competencies to truly open science to all.

Lessons from a breast cell annotation competition series for school pupils

Due to COVID-19 outbreaks, most school pupils have had to be home-schooled for long periods of time. Two editions of a web-based competition “Beat the Pathologists” for school age participants in the UK ran to fill up pupils’ spare time after home-schooling and evaluate their ability on contributing to AI annotation. The two editions asked the participants to annotate different types of cells on Ki67 stained breast cancer images. The Main competition was at four levels with different level of complexity. We obtained annotations of four kinds of cells entered by school pupils and ground truth from expert pathologists. In this paper, we analyse school pupils’ performance on differentiating different kinds of cells and compare their performance with two neural networks (AlexNet and VGG16). It was observed that children tend to get very good performance in tumour cell annotation with the best F1 measure 0.81 which is a metrics taking both false positives and false negatives into account. Low accuracy was achieved with F1 score 0.75 on positive non-tumour cells and 0.59 on negative non-tumour cells. Superior performance on non-tumour cell detection was achieved by neural networks. VGG16 with training from scratch achieved an F1 score over 0.70 in all cell categories and 0.92 in tumour cell detection. We conclude that non-experts like school pupils have the potential to contribute to large-scale labelling for AI algorithm development if sufficient training activities are organised. We hope that competitions like this can promote public interest in pathology and encourage participation by more non-experts for annotation.

Using mobile phones as light at night and noise measurement instruments: a validation test in real world conditions

Exposure to noise from road traffic and industries is known to be linked to various health dysfunctions, including hypertension, cardiovascular diseases and hearing loss. Exposure to artificial light at night (ALAN) is also increasingly recognized as being associated with ecosystem damage and various illnesses, including cancers, excessive weight gain and sleep disorders. However, measuring and monitoring these environmental risk factors by professional equipment are laborious and expensive, which impede large-scale research and various citizen science initiatives. In this study, we test a possibility that reliable noise and ALAN exposure estimates can be gathered using smartphones (SPs) sensors. To verify this assumption, we develop a standardized testing protocol, and use Andro-Sensor app, installed on three different Samsung Galaxy SPs - S7, S20FE5G, and SM520F, - to perform measurements of ALAN and noise in real-world conditions while comparing these measurements with measurements performed by professional (type 2) equipment - SL814 for noise and LX-1330B for illumination. The analysis of 3450 measurements, performed in two different locations in Israel, reveals that the SPs measurements and measurements performed by control instruments correlate strongly for noise (r = 0.76-0.94) and are nearly identical for ALAN (r = 0.998-0.999). The association between the two types of measurements is also found to be close to linear, with the slope of the trend line being close to 45° for ALAN and varying between 30° and 45° for noise, depending on the SPs used. Our conclusion is that the level of accuracy of ALAN measurements by SPs is greater for ALAN than for noise, which can make SPs a useful tool for large-scale ALAN studies that do not require the accuracy of professional instruments.

Knowing Your Audience: A Typology of Smoke Sense Participants to Inform Wildfire Smoke Health Risk Communication

Central to public health risk communication is understanding the perspectives and shared values among individuals who need the information. Using the responses from a Smoke Sense citizen science project, we examined perspectives on the issue of wildfire smoke as a health risk in relation to an individual's preparedness to adopt recommended health behaviors. The Smoke Sense smartphone application provides wildfire-related health risk resources and invites participants to record their perspectives on the issue of wildfire smoke. Within the app, participants can explore current and forecasted daily air quality, maps of fire locations, satellite images of smoke plumes, and learn about health consequences of wildfire smoke. We used cluster analysis to identify perspective trait-clusters based on health status, experience with fire smoke, risk perception, self-efficacy, access to exposure-reducing resources, health information needs, and openness to health risk messaging. Differences between traits were examined based on demographics, health status, activity level and engagement with the app. We mapped these traits to the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM) to indicate where each trait lies in adopting recommended health behaviors. Finally, we suggest messaging strategies that may be suitable for each trait. We determined five distinct perspective traits which included individuals who were Protectors and have decided to engage on the issue by adopting new behaviors to protect their health; Cautious, Proactive, and Susceptible individuals who were at a Deciding stage but differed based on risk perceptions and information needs; and the Unengaged who did not perceive smoke as a health issue and were unlikely to change behavior in response to messaging. Across all five traits, the level of engagement and information needs differed substantially, but were not defined by demographics. Individuals in the Susceptible trait had the highest level of engagement and the highest information needs. Messaging that emphasizes self-efficacy and benefits of reducing exposure may be effective in motivating individuals from the deciding stage to taking health protective action. Shared perspectives define an individual's propensity for acting on recommended health behaviors, therefore, health risk message content should be tailored based on these perspectives.