West Nile virus (WNV) is the primary mosquito-borne disease in the United States and has had case reports every year since its introduction in 1999. As such, it is critical that we characterize the ...distribution of WNV vectors. Estimates of Culex tarsalis Coquillett species distribution, a major WNV vector, are scarce. We used ensemble distribution modeling to estimate habitat suitability for this species across the contiguous United States by consolidating presence data from four publicly available mosquito trapping data servers.The central plains region and much of the western US were estimated to have high habitat suitability. We identified multiple metrics of temperature and precipitation to be important in predicting the occurrence of Cx. tarsalis in a given geographic area. Furthermore, we observed habitat suitability for Cx. tarsalis to be significantly higher in areas with a high incidence of West Nile neuroinvasive disease compared to areas with low WN disease incidence, suggesting that Cx. tarsalis is present in regions with a high incidence of disease.
In the second half of this essay about reifications in disease ecology, drawing upon our experience, we propose ideas and practices for invigorating a disease ecology by, and for, the people, guided ...by pedagogical principles and experiences that do not separate subjects and objects of study into roles and categories. Rather, we envision a disease ecology that seeks to understand relations, processes and contexts driving complex ecological phenomena like disease emergence. In doing so, we examine how science, when brought into a political pedagogy of context and relation, may become surprisingly helpful in moving beyond the false erudition that José Martí critiqued at the start of our colonial capitalist modernity.
Disease ecology has the potential to help build a new society where the contradictions of our time are recognized and confronted in the pursuit of a more considered, and just, understanding of the ...interrelationships of organisms with the environment. Unfortunately, the discipline is facing a major dilemma as the advent of new technologies, access to remote data, and lack of engagement with the contexts where diseases emerge and are transmitted, has resulted in the creation of Blame Local Indigenous and Peasant Populations (BLIPP) narratives that align with hegemonic globalizing agents and processes. Here, in the first half of a two-part essay about reifications in disease ecology, thinking with dialectical materialism, we demystify BLIPP narratives around land use change in disease emergence.
The spread of COVID-19 is geographically uneven in agricultural regions. Explanations proposed include differences in occupational risks, access to healthcare, racial inequalities, and approaches to ...public health. Here, we additionally explore the impacts of coexisting modes of agricultural production across counties from twelve midwestern U.S. states. In modeling COVID-19 spread before vaccine authorization, we employed and extended spatial statistical methods that make different assumptions about the natures and scales of underlying sociospatial processes. In the process, we also develop a novel approach to visualizing the results of geographically weighted regressions that allows us to identify distinctive regional regimes of epidemiological processes. Our approaches allowed for models using abstract spatial weights (e.g., inverse-squared distances) to be meaningfully improved by also integrating process-specific relations (e.g., the geographical relations of the food system or of commuting). We thus contribute in several ways to methods in health geography and epidemiology for identifying contextually sensitive public engagements in socio-eco-epidemiological issues. Our results further show that agricultural modes of production are associated with the spread of COVID-19, with counties more engaged in modes of regenerative agricultural production having lower COVID-19 rates than those dominated by modes of conventional agricultural production, even when accounting for other factors.
This essay offers paths for scholars influenced by the critical social sciences and theoretical humanities to contribute to the construction of concepts and digital practices of “data” that will ...allow “data” to better align with their approaches to scholarly inquiry. In particular, it explores how “geographic information” might be refashioned, rereading it from simplified theoretical positions drawn from interpretative inquiry, process-relational thought, and new materialisms. Geographic information has largely called forth self-sufficient entities that have intensive properties, are indexed by location in an absolute space, and are known objectively through a geographic gaze. By contrast, this article suggests ways geographic information may be reimagined to constitute spaces as relational, matter as vibrant, and/or knowledge as situated. If all claims are seen as interpretative, the boundaries between what were previously considered the roles for reader, researcher, data structures, observer, and observed may also need to be reordered, with implications for the ways that we “interface” with data. Although such paths can be difficult to travel, they hold promise for extending the reach of interpretative and (non-positivist) empirical practice as well as favorably altering the terms on which interpretative scholars can participate in debates around, and practices of, “data” today.
For geographical imagination systems Bergmann, Luke; Lally, Nick
Annals of the American Association of Geographers,
01/2021, Volume:
111, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
For many, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related libraries for programming languages define the terrain of geographical computing today. But what if GIS were locales within wider realms of ...geographical imagination systems (gis), realms more adequate to diverse theoretical commitments of geographical thought? Examining how various thinkers in spatial theory have conceived of phenomena, space, knowledge, and their entanglements, this article advocates for geographical imagination systems that change the infrastructures of geographical computation and broaden its associated objects of intellectual inquiry. In doing so, it centers questions such as: What if knowledge were understood as interpreted experience? What if phenomena were represented as individuated out of process and internal relations? What if spaces and coordinates were coproduced with phenomena? Interludes juxtapose such considerations with concrete possibilities realized by an experimental prototype geographical imagination system under development. As the article also argues, though, crucial to the future of geographic computation adequate to geographical inquiry will be diverse creative conversations in code (valued alongside and) intellectually interwoven with scholarly interventions made through mediums such as the written word.
The impacts of climate change on vector-borne diseases are uneven across human populations. This pattern reflects the effect of changing environments on the biology of transmission, which is also ...modulated by social and other inequities. These disparities are also linked to research outcomes that could be translated into tools for transmission reduction, but are not necessarily actionable in the communities where transmission occurs. The transmission of vector-borne diseases could be averted by developing research that is both hypothesis-driven and community-serving for populations affected by climate change, where local communities interact as equal partners with scientists, developing and implementing research projects with the aim of improving community health. In this Personal View, we share five principles that have guided our research practice to serve the needs of communities affected by vector-borne diseases.
•We built a conceptual model of digital divide, covering the first, second, and third-order digital divide.•Spatial differences and geographical cluster characteristics are identified and ...analyzed.•The leading determinants of ICT diffusion are urban residential income, gross enrollment ratio, and rural residential income.•Socio-economic problems, rather than institutions and innovation aspects, have to be solved for ICT diffusion.
Much research has made efforts to elaborate upon different dimensions to the digital divide, including informational and communications technology (ICT) access, ICT usage, and ICT outcomes. We assess the utility of such perspectives for studying digital inequality across prefectural cities in China. China is the world's largest ICT market in terms of the number of mobile devices in use, internet users, and broadband subscriptions, yet it has notable digital inequality within and between provinces, prefectural cities, and counties. In this study, we built a conceptual framework of digital divides for prefectural cities in China, examined spatial agglomeration using cluster analysis, and explored the leading correlates using a geographically-weighted regression (GWR) model. A large digital divide among the prefectural cities in China was revealed, with cities with a high administrative level having a relatively high digital development index(DDI) score. Prefectural cities with high DDI levels are mainly agglomerated in large metropolitan areas, such as Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the West Coast Economic Zone of the Taiwan Straits. Prefectural cities with low DDI levels are concentrated in the rural-mountainous regions in southwest China and poverty-stricken areas in central and western China. This study also found that the leading determinants of the digital divide are urban residential income, the secondary education gross enrollment ratio, rural residential income, and the working age population ratio, which indicates that socio-economic problems, rather than institution and innovation aspects, have to be solved for improving ICT use and outcomes.
This article suggests an approach to economic-geographic quantification that is relevant to engaging the socionatural blurring of an Anthropocene. It develops representations of commodities and of ...economies that draw upon concepts of absolute, relative, and relational space to help move beyond legacies of the Nature-Society divide in economic-geographic thought. To supplement familiar ways of knowing commodities as bounded objects with associated single values (prices), the piece rereads input-output approaches, providing accounts of how commodities enfold relations among socionatural phenomena. It quantifies and maps the activities and flows of the global economy in 2007 in terms of their embodied carbon emissions, labor times, and harvested land areas alongside their monetary values. Comparing the perspectives that result, it identifies empirical and theoretical challenges that a political-industrial ecology could help address.
In the absence of entomological information, tools for predicting
spp. presence can help evaluate the entomological risk of malaria transmission. Here, we illustrate how species distribution models ...(SDM) could quantify potential dominant vector species presence in malaria elimination settings. We fitted a 250 m resolution ensemble SDM for
Wiedemann. The ensemble SDM included predictions based on seven different algorithms, 110 occurrence records and 70 model projections. SDM covariates included nine environmental variables that were selected based on their importance from an original set of 28 layers that included remotely and spatially interpolated locally measured variables for the land surface of Costa Rica. Goodness of fit for the ensemble SDM was very high, with a minimum AUC of 0.79. We used the resulting ensemble SDM to evaluate differences in habitat suitability (HS) between commercial plantations and surrounding landscapes, finding a higher HS in pineapple and oil palm plantations, suggestive of
presence, than in surrounding landscapes. The ensemble SDM suggested a low HS for
at the presumed epicenter of malaria transmission during 2018-2019 in Costa Rica, yet this vector was likely present at the two main towns also affected by the epidemic. Our results illustrate how ensemble SDMs in malaria elimination settings can provide information that could help to improve vector surveillance and control.
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