GISWiki.NEWS.Reader » Items by Annelise Tran, Nicolas Poncon, Celine Toty, Catherine Linard, Helene Guis, Jean-Baptiste Ferre, Danny Lo Seen, Francois Roger, Stephane de La Rocque, Didier Fontenille and Thierry Baldet

GISWiki.NEWS.Reader » Items by Annelise Tran, Nicolas Poncon, Celine Toty, Catherine Linard, Helene Guis, Jean-Baptiste Ferre, Danny Lo Seen, Francois Roger, Stephane de La Rocque, Didier Fontenille and Thierry Baldet

Feeds

Englisch Newspages

Englisch Newspages

Deutsche Newsseiten

Deutsche Newsseiten

Blogs

Jobs

Jobs

Map-Services

Spanish Newspages

Spanish Newspages

Items by Annelise Tran, Nicolas Poncon, Celine Toty, Catherine Linard, Helene Guis, Jean-Baptiste Ferre, Danny Lo Seen, Francois Roger, Stephane de La Rocque, Didier Fontenille and Thierry Baldet

International Journal of Health Geographics - Latest articles

Using remote sensing to map larval and adult populations of Anopheles hyrcanus (Diptera: Culicidae) a potential malaria vector in Southern France

Fetched: February 26th, 2008, 5:30pm CET by Annelise Tran, Nicolas Poncon, Celine Toty, Catherine Linard, Helene Guis, Jean-Baptiste Ferre, Danny Lo Seen, Francois Roger, Stephane de La Rocque, Didier Fontenille and Thierry Baldet

Background: Although malaria disappeared from southern France more than 60 years ago, suspicions of recent autochthonous transmission in the French Mediterranean coast support the idea that the area could still be subject to malaria transmission. The main potential vector of malaria in the Camargue area, the largest river delta in southern France, is the mosquito Anopheles hyrcanus (Diptera: Culicidae). In the context of recent climatic and landscape changes, the evaluation of the risk of emergence or re-emergence of such a major disease is of great importance in Europe. When assessing the risk of emergence of vector-borne diseases, it is crucial to be able to characterize the arthropod vector's spatial distribution. Given that remote sensing techniques can describe some of the environmental parameters which drive this distribution, satellite imagery or aerial photographs could be used for vector mapping. Results: In this study, we propose a method to map larval and adult populations of An. hyrcanus based on environmental indices derived from high spatial resolution imagery. The analysis of the link between entomological field data on An. hyrcanus larvae and environmental indices (biotopes, distance to the nearest main productive breeding sites of this species i.e., rice fields) led to the definition of a larval index, defined as the probability of observing An. hyrcanus larvae in a given site at least once over a year. Independent accuracy assessments showed a good agreement between observed and predicted values (sensitivity and specificity of the logistic regression model being 0.76 and 0.78, respectively). An adult index was derived from the larval index by averaging the larval index within a buffer around the trap location. This index was highly correlated with observed adult abundance values (Pearson r = 0.97, p