Epidemiology and Public Health

Many infectious diseases and chronic illnesses have underlying spatiotemporal relationships with the environment that are challenging to integrate into public health strategies. Additionally, changing climates, land cover conversion, and increases in global transportation are likely to shift disease distributions and spatiotemporal patterns. The environmental health and epidemiological communities desire spatially explicit models that characterize pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs to bridge information gaps. Analytical tools, data organization, and specialized products are needed to integrate environmental information and geographic principals with health studies in a scientifically sound manner.

Advancing geospatial technologies provide new opportunities to increase our understanding of disease ecology and address public health concerns. AGS is at the forefront of generating specialized products from remote sensing technologies, climate models, and developing custom web-based mapping tools for particular health applications. We devote much of our efforts to obtaining complex measurements and transforming that data into useful, easy-to-use information for end-users.

Example projects include:

• Assist environmental health and epidemiological investigators with geographic data
• Monitoring agro-ecological attributes in Indonesia for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza assessment
• Mapping forest attributes for Lyme risk models in New England
• Mapping Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs) in freshwater systems