The Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES) is an expert organization and a state-owned enterprise of the Republic of Austria. It was founded in 2002 based on the One Health approach and has a statutory mandate to safeguard the health of humans, animals, and plants.
AGES conducts its own citizen science projects in various fields. Current projects include:
- Mosquito Alert: In this project, participants help track the spread of the tiger mosquito in Austria by reporting sightings via an app.
- SoilBlitz: This project uses simple and quick soil tests to capture a “snapshot” of local soil health, thereby collecting important data on soil quality.
- SoilPlastic: This citizen science app documents plastic finds in soil to better understand the extent and impact of plastic residues in the soil and thus contribute to reducing plastic pollution.
- Tea Bag Index: This project investigates how quickly organic material decomposes in the soil by having citizen scientists dig up buried tea bags and measure their weight loss.
- UrbanBEE: Citizens monitor the bee hotels set up in Vienna on a weekly basis to find out how wild bees use urban habitats and what factors influence their biodiversity in urban ecosystems.
- Identifying Ticks for Research Purposes: Ticks submitted by citizens are identified and examined by AGES. This helps monitor which tick species and pathogens are present in ticks in Austria.
In addition, AGES, in cooperation with the “Österreich forscht” platform (www.citizen-science.at) and the FWF (Austrian Science Fund), organized the 2017 Austrian Citizen Science Conference and has since regularly participated in the annual event with exciting topics and projects.
