The Catalan-origin Mosquito Alert citizen-science platform now operates across a dozen national partners and tracks five species of public-health concern, *Aedes albopictus*, *Ae. aegypti*, *Ae. japonicus*, *Ae. koreicus*, and *Culex pipiens*, through smartphone photo submissions validated by a network of 50+ expert entomologists. The case for installing it is unusually clean.
The Asian tiger mosquito has the best PR of any invasive insect in Europe. Most people who live in southern France, northern Italy, or eastern Spain have at least heard of Aedes albopictus. Most of them could not name another invasive Aedes species if pressed. Almost none could name the other four mosquitoes that the European Environment Agency now regards as worth systematically monitoring across the continent.
The Catalan-origin platform Mosquito Alert has spent the past five years quietly assembling the answer to that gap. Launched in Spain in 2014 by a CREAF, UPF, ICREA and CEAB-CSIC research consortium, the platform has since expanded into a pan-European citizen-science network, Europe-wide since 2020. It is set up to receive, validate, and map sightings of five species of public-health concern. They are:
- Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, established in 83 of 96 metropolitan French départements, across most of Italy, large parts of Spain, and increasingly into Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. A known vector of chikungunya and dengue, and a possible contributor to Zika outbreaks.
- Aedes aegypti, the yellow-fever mosquito. The principal global urban arbovirus vector. Recolonised Madeira (Portugal) and reappeared in southern Russia and Georgia on the Black Sea, with reported introductions into Cyprus. Not yet established in mainland EU but the subject of every European entomologist's contingency planning.
- Aedes japonicus, the Asian bush mosquito. Reported across central Europe, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and France since the 2000s. A competent laboratory vector of West Nile virus and several other flaviviruses; its public-health impact in Europe is still being characterised.
- Aedes koreicus, the Korean bush mosquito. First detected in Europe in 2008 and since reported in Belgium and northern Italy. Less well-studied than its Japanese cousin. Almost no general-readership name recognition.
- Culex pipiens, the common house mosquito. Native, ubiquitous, and a major European vector of West Nile virus. Not invasive but increasingly important as Europe's WNV burden expands northwards.
The pedagogical point this list makes is that "the mosquito problem in Europe" is not a single problem. It is at least five problems, with overlapping but distinct ecologies, distributions, and disease-transmission profiles. Knowing one species is not the same as knowing the others. The case for citizen science is that there are not enough trained entomologists to track all five at the scale the European public-health system needs them tracked, and there are enough people with smartphones, gardens, and curiosity to make up the difference if the workflow is built right.
How the app actually works
The Mosquito Alert workflow is built around photographs. A user spots a mosquito or a likely breeding site, a stagnant container, a clogged gutter, a tyre rim full of rainwater, opens the app, takes a photo, geo-tags it, and submits it. The submission lands in a queue. From there, more than 50 international expert entomologists working through the Mosquito Alert validation network examine the photograph and classify it: species identified with confidence, species identified probably, or unclassifiable. Confirmed sightings flow into a public, real-time interactive map. Probable sightings inform internal trend analysis. Unclassifiable submissions feed back into the next round of user education.
The methodology has been validated in Nature Communications, a 2017 paper that established the platform's expert-confirmation accuracy and its complementarity with traditional ovitrap-based surveillance. The platform's developers have always been explicit on this point: Mosquito Alert does not aim to replace traditional surveillance methods, but rather to complement them. The point is breadth and timeliness, picking up first detections in new geographies faster than the every-second-week ovitrap rotation can, rather than precision.
The early evidence on that bet is strong. Spanish volunteers have logged more than 18,300 sightings over the platform's first five years. The European expansion since 2020 has reproduced the pattern in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and beyond.
The pan-European partner network
Mosquito Alert's European architecture is built around national partners. In Austria, the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES) runs the local instance, coordinated by Dr Karin Bakran-Lebl, with established tiger mosquito populations in parts of Vienna and Graz. AGES also runs SURVector, a separate nationwide mosquito and tick monitoring programme, alongside conventional ovitrap surveillance.
In Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and several others, parallel arrangements with national environmental and public-health agencies feed the same continental data flow. The app itself supports multiple languages, English, Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, French, and others, and the validation work is distributed across the participating expert network.
The European Environment Agency's Climate-ADAPT portal lists Mosquito Alert as one of the named tools in the EU's "Observations and Scenarios" public-health adaptation toolkit. That is the formal acknowledgement, in the EU's own climate-adaptation reference architecture, that a smartphone-based citizen-science platform is now part of the continental defence against vector-borne disease.
Why this matters editorially
Mosticare's editorial position on personal protection is that the most cost-effective layer is the one closest to the individual reader's daily life: long sleeves, screened windows, source-reduction in domestic gardens, sleep under nets when travelling in active-transmission zones. The Mosquito Alert platform sits one layer further out, at the level of neighbourhood-scale information rather than personal-scale protection, but the two layers reinforce each other.
A reader who can recognise Aedes albopictus on sight is also a reader who knows to empty the plant saucer in the corner of the patio. A reader who has spent five minutes on the Mosquito Alert map looking at where Aedes koreicus has been confirmed in their region is also a reader who is unlikely to be surprised when the next Italian or Austrian regional health bulletin mentions it. Citizen-science participation and personal-protection discipline are the same skill applied at two different scales.
This is the rare case where Mosticare's recommendation is to install something. The Mosquito Alert app is free, multilingual, and built by researchers who have made the data public. For a Mosticare reader in Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, or Switzerland, and increasingly in the rest of central and southern Europe, installing it, learning the five species, and sending in a photo when one of them shows up on the kitchen window is a small useful contribution to a continental surveillance picture that benefits everyone.
What to watch next
The platform's near-term growth path runs along two axes. The first is additional countries, particularly in eastern and northern Europe, where the surveillance picture for Aedes japonicus and Aedes koreicus remains thinner than the platform's current western and central coverage. The second is integration with formal ECDC surveillance products, including the agency's weekly West Nile virus bulletin and the chikungunya and dengue monthly bulletins.
A piece worth watching for the late summer is whether Mosquito Alert's citizen submissions become a formal input to ECDC's first-detection alerting workflow rather than a parallel community-science track. That step, when it happens, will mark the moment when European vector-borne disease surveillance officially incorporates the smartphone into its core methodology. The 2026 season is the one to watch for the first signs.
Sources cited
- Mosquito Alert, institutional organization, https://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/about-us/institutional-organization/
- AGES, Mosquito Alert project page, https://www.ages.at/en/research/project-highlights/mosquito-alert
- European Environment Agency, Climate-ADAPT portal entry, Citizen scientist project: App launched to track spread of mosquitoes in Europe, https://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/en/metadata/portals/citizen-scientist-project-app-launched-to-track-spread-of-mosquitoes-in-europe
- Palmer J. et al. (2017), Citizen science provides a reliable and scalable tool to track disease-carrying mosquitoes, Nature Communications, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00914-9
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Aedes albopictus factsheet for experts, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/aedes-albopictus
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Aedes aegypti factsheet for experts, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/aedes-aegypti
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Aedes japonicus factsheet for experts, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/aedes-japonicus
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Aedes koreicus factsheet for experts, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/aedes-koreicus
- European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Culex pipiens factsheet for experts, https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/infectious-disease-topics/related-public-health-topics/disease-vectors/facts/mosquito-factsheets/culex-pipiens
- Santé publique France, "Face aux moustiques et aux maladies qu'ils transmettent, protégeons-nous!" 6 May 2026, https://www.santepubliquefrance.fr/presse/face-aux-moustiques-et-aux-maladies-quils-transmettent-protegeons-nous