#land_use

... when the colors are from satellite remote sensing of the Earth surface. This has been contemplated for many years and I'm glad to see that the work is bearing fruit. In September 2006, while with IUCN, I helped cosponsor a conference organized by the EPA on biodiversity and human health (http://www.epa.gov/ncer/biodiversity/workshop.html). I look forward to the use of remote sensing to link biodiversity and emerging infectious disease through changes in land cover and land use patterns.

Predicting disease outbreaks will be an important service in the future under global change scenarios now contemplated. Resilient communities can, I hope, be proactive in disease prevention through better land use planning and biodiversity conservation measures.

For example, invasive species can be vectors for pests and diseases. Can remote sensing help us in the early detection and rapid response of invasives? Not in all cases, but perhaps in some significant ways.

In any event, satellite remote sensing is an important tool, but it is not a substitute for intimate familiarity with our surroundings. We need to be sensitive to change, and know enough about what is there to be able to see change.

Amplify’d from www.physorg.com

By watching colors change on photographs of the Earth's surface, scientists can figure out, months or even years ahead of time, when a disease might flare up and become a serious hazard.

"Satellite prediction is a very exciting approach, though it still needs more refinement," Ford said, adding that any information from the sky must always be double-checked against conditions on the ground.

Ford has examined other diseases whose spread might be predicted from satellite images. For malaria, public health officials could examine the amount and location of standing water where disease-carrying mosquitoes reproduce. For cholera, they could look at sea surface height and levels of the green pigment chlorophyll, because cholera bacteria spend much of their life attached to a floating animal that feeds on chlorophyll-filled plants.

Advance warning of an outbreak can be a matter of life and death. Ford's research shows that if health officials know that a cholera outbreak might be coming, they can encourage people to take simple precautions like filtering drinking water through a cloth, which can reduce mortality by 50 percent. In the case of hantavirus, people in areas where mouse populations spiked in 2005 and 2006 were warned to avoid sweeping out barns -- the virus typically infects humans when they breathe in tiny particles that spread into the air from mouse droppings.

Remote tracking of disease will likely grow in the coming years, as images get sharper and data analysis gets more sophisticated.

Read more at www.physorg.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bronn