Campaign-Based Citizen Science for Environmental Mycology: the "Science Solstice" and "Summer Soil-stice" Projects to Assess Drug Resistance in Air and Soilborne Aspergillus fumigatus

Citizen science projects are often undertaken for ecological and environmental research purposes but also have great potential for use in microbiology research to track the emergence and spread of pathogens in the environment. Science Solstice and Summer Soil-stice are mycology citizen science projects aimed at assessing drug resistance in Aspergillus fumigatus fungal spores found in air and soil, respectively, in the United Kingdom (UK). A. fumigatus plays an important role in the environment as a decomposer of plant material, but is also an opportunistic human lung pathogen. Infection with drug-resistant spores can lead to a worse clinical outcome for the patient. On the first four solstice and equinox days between June 2018 and June 2019, volunteers were asked to collect air samples from their homes and workplaces and return them to our lab in Freepost envelopes. An additional round of samples was requested from volunteers gardens and/or compost on the June 2019 solstice. In total, 787 volunteers returned 2,132 air samples and 509 soil samples, which grew a total of 7,991 A. fumigatus colonies. The estimated total cost of the study was {pound}2,650; the equivalent of 33 pence per A. fumigatus colony grown. Incorporating citizen science into the environmental surveillance of drug-resistant A. fumigatus allowed for the simultaneous collection of hundreds of environmental samples across the entire UK on the same day. The insights generated from this study would not be practical in the absence of public participation and offers opportunities to ask scientific questions that were previously unaskable.