2,250 students across Spain have taken part this academic year in the Mosquito Alert educational program

30/05/2025

Images of the Mosquito Alert educational program. Credits: E. Mora

These students come from 52 schools and institutes across the country. The program equips them to act as citizen scientists, making them valuable contributors to the Mosquito Alert citizen science platform.

For the past ten years, Mosquito Alert — coordinated by CEAB-CSIC — has brought science and prevention into classrooms through its educational program. It is carried out in schools across Spain and engages teachers, students, and families in monitoring mosquito populations, particularly those species known to transmit diseases.

The programme is aimed at pupils in Year 5 and 6 of primary school and secondary students. Each age group follows specific learning goals and activities tailored to their level, which explains why many schools take part with multiple classes at once.

All pathways start with an age-appropriate basic introduction to mosquitoes, their common breeding sites, and ways to eliminate or manage those. From there, the tasks differ by age group. The younger students receive a fieldwork kit and use it to search for mosquito larvae in their everyday environments. Once the collection is complete, teachers send the kits to the Mosquito Alert team, who analyse them and integrate the data with other sources. Finally, the children create infographics to share their key learnings.

Santi Escartín — a biologist and president of the Xatrac association, which develops the project with the support of CEAB-CSIC — explains: “We manage to raise awareness across entire communities, as the children bring what they’ve learned back to their families and surroundings. They understand the importance of preventing breeding sites like flowerpots, buckets, or any container where stagnant water remains. We also gain valuable collaborators in mosquito surveillance who join as citizen scientists.”

Mar Jambou, an environmental scientist at CEAB-CSIC and member of the education team, gives an example of the importance of such involvement: “Last year, the kits from all the schools in Donostia contained larvae of Aedes japonicus. This gave us very valuable information, as although we knew the species was present in the area, we didn’t realise it was so widespread.”

The challenge for the middle age group is to take their knowledge beyond their immediate surroundings. They are asked to design and carry out a communication campaign targeting an audience of their choice.

The oldest students conduct genuine scientific research on a specific topic related to disease-vector mosquitoes and produce a poster showcasing their main findings, just as researchers do for conferences.

Incidence throughout the country

The awareness-raising work of the educational programme contributes significantly to mosquito monitoring, research, and control — particularly for disease-vector species. That’s why the Mosquito Alert team aims to involve schools from across Spain, especially in areas where problematic mosquito species are prevalent and environmental conditions support their proliferation, such as the Canary Islands or Andalusia.

End-of-year Science Fair and Jury Awards

For the second year in a row, the educational programme will close the school year with a major event: the “final event”, held on 5 June at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid.

Representatives selected by each school — the students responsible for the best project in each age group — will take part. They will present their work at a kind of science fair, which will also be visited by a professional jury responsible for awarding the Mosquito Alert Educational Programme Prizes.