Abstract
Mosquito-borne diseases affect millions of people worldwide. In the United States, since 1999, West Nile Virus (WNV) has infected 36,801 people and has caused the deaths of 1,580. In California, since 2002, nearly 3,600 people have been infected with WNV with an additional 124 fatalities. Analyses of remotely- and spatially-based data have proven to facilitate the study of mosquito-borne diseases, including WNV. This study proposes an efficient procedure to identify swimming pools that may serve as potential mosquito habitat. The procedure derives the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) from high resolution, multi-spectral imagery to detect the presence of surface water, and then incorporates vector-based data layers within a GIS to identify residential land parcels with detectable water. This study compared the parcels identified as having water (535) with parcels known to have swimming pools (682) resulting in an accuracy of 78.4%. Nineteen of the 147 land parcels with swimming pools had backyards with enough vegetation to obscure the presence of a swimming pool from the satellite. The remaining 128 parcels lacked enough surface water for the NDWI to indicate them as actually having surface water. It is likely then that swimming pools, associated with such parcels, may have enough water in them to provide adequate habitat for mosquitoes, and so field inspection by mosquito abatement personnel would be justified.
Highlights
Mosquito-borne diseases affect many people throughout the world
This study has developed an efficient procedure that would allow for the identification of residential parcels whose swimming pools may be unmaintained and which would likely provide habitat for mosquitoes to breed, and it is posited that mosquito abatement personnel, who have technician-level geographic information systems (GIS) expertise, should be able to employ the procedure in their district offices
The integration of remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) technologies has greatly facilitated the detection of mosquito habitats in both urban and non-urban settings [13,15,35]
Summary
Mosquito-borne diseases affect many people throughout the world. In 2010, the World HealthOrganization (WHO) estimated that there were approximately 219 million cases of malaria and an estimated 660,000 fatalities [1], and from 1 to 50 million cases of dengue, including about20,000 fatalities every year [2]. Mosquito-borne diseases affect many people throughout the world. Cases of malaria and dengue in the United States of America (USA). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a cumulative total of 36,801 cases of WNV infections and 1,580 fatalities were reported in the USA from 1999 to 2012 in every state (including the District of Columbia) except for Alaska and Hawaii [3]. In the state of California, there were 3,598 cases of WNV infections and 124 fatalities from 2002 to 2012 [3]. Mosquito species responsible for the spread of WNV in California and include six species of culex (Cx. pipiens, Cx. quinquefasciatus, Cx. stigmatosoma, and Cx. tarsalis) and may be present in urban/suburban waters [6]. Culex mosquitoes typically lay between 100 and 300 eggs at a time, and are arranged to fit together in such a manner that the collection of eggs forms a raft which floats on the water surface
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