GEO Health Community of Practice Updates

Updates from the GEO Health CoP

GEO Health Community of Practice

• GEO Health Community of Practice: Our next telecons will be held on March 30^th (Focus: COVID-19 Research Applications), April 20^th (Focus: Air Quality topics), and May 4^th(Focus: TBA)!
• Our next telecon will be on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 from 8:30-10:00AM EDT (GMT-4). During this meeting, there will be three invited presentations.
  • First, Marjan Van Meerloo (European Commission) will provide an overview of the European Commission’s Early Warning for Epidemics Prize.
  • Second, Antar Jutla (University of Florida) will highlight findings from his research project, “Earth Observations Inspired Prediction of Risk of Airborne Infectious Pathogens: A Curious Case of COVID-19”.
  • Finally, Ben Zaitchik (Johns Hopkins University) will provide an update from his research that aims to harmonize Earth observation datasets with COVID-19 cases. He will also offer insight on the new report by the WMO COVID-19 Task Team. We hope that these presentations focusing on COVID-19 research applications will continue to strengthen our scientific networks!

Upcoming Webinars & Workshops

• Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research: Forest fires, climate change, and deforestation in the Amazon region: real time monitoring of air quality and respiratory health during the pandemic on Friday, March 26, 2021 from 10AM ET (GMT-4). In this talk Prof. Foster Brown, will address the confluence of a pandemic with climate change and the results of deforestation, with his perspective of scientist from the Amazon Region. He will explore his role as part of COVID-19 Response Committee of the Federal University and the interactions with M.Ds. who are in the forefront of treating the pandemic in Acre. Then, Dr. Brown will present the successful collaboration they set with the Public Health Ministry of Acre to use the Internet-of-Things to expand a network of inexpensive air quality sensors that have proven to be very useful to document the extension and human exposure to high levels of smoke. He will also present some examples of the analysis of near real-time imagery of fires and deforestation in the region. Finally, the talk will focus on what we can do and the role of science and education to tackle this multi-hazard crisis.
• Access High-Res Satellite Data to Tackle Tropical Deforestation: An Introduction to the NICFI Data Program. This webinar will be held on Monday, March 29, 2021 from 10:00AM EDT (GMT-4). This webinar will introduce the Norway’s International Climate & Forests Initiative (NICFI)’s data program and will showcase three innovative use cases from Amazon Conservation, FAO and NASA/SERVIR.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Climate and Health webinar (Focus: Pollen) on Wednesday, March 31, 2021 from 1:00-2:30PM EST (GMT-4).
• GEO Knowledge Hub Webinar Series: Fostering Open Knowledge with Earth Observations: The 2^nd GEO Knowledge Hug Webinar: Knowledge Package Deep Dive will be held on Thursday, April 1, 2021 from 7:00AM-8:00AM EDT (GMT-4). This webinar will cover a deep dive into the Land Use/Land Cover Classification Knowledge Package developed by the Brazilian Data Cube team at INPE. The webinar will illustrate the journey of a Knowledge Provider, from creating a Knowledge Package through to sharing it in the GEO Knowledge Hub. The Knowledge Provider will also illustrate their user experience and highlight the added value a Knowledge Package offers to fully understand and reproduce an Earth observations solution.
• US Environmental Protection Agency: As part of the Environmental Justice and Systemic Racism Speaker Seies session, the Redlining and the Climate Crisis webinar will be held on Tuesday, April 6, 2021 from 12:00-1:00PM EST (GMT-4). The co-authors of a recent study on the correlation of redlined areas and the location of urban heat islands will discuss their participatory research on the spatial distribution of climate impacts, involving communities in measuring heat in cities.  Their interdisciplinary approach offers a compelling perspective on how scientists and residents seek to address disproportionate vulnerability emerging from climate change. Featured speakers are Dr. Jeremy Hoffman, Science Museum of Virginia, and Dr. Vivek Shand as, Portland State University.
• American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference 2021: This conference will be held virtually from April 7-11, 2021. More than 4,500 presentations and posters will be presented on topics including climatology and meteorology, land use, medical and health geography, and environmental science.
• American Geophysical Union: Storytelling 101: Making Stories (and your Science) on April 15, 2021 at 2:00-3:00PM ET (GMT-5). Archived Webinars are available on the AGU Webinar YouTube channel.

Upcoming ARSET Training

• Use of Solar Induced Fluorescence and LIDAR to Assess Vegetation Change and Vulnerability: This four-part series will be held on March 16, 18, 23, and 25, 2021, from 11:00AM-1:00PM EDT (GMT-4). This introductory webinar series will cover the fundamentals of Solar Induced Fluorescence (SIF) and LIDAR, their applications, and an overview of different satellite data sources that are openly available. In addition, it will also include a step-by-step guide on how to access, open, and interpret SIF and LIDAR data.
• Introduction to Population Grids and their Integration with Remote Sensing Data for Sustainable Development and Disaster Management: This two-part series will be held on March 30 and April 6, 2021, from 10:00AM-12:00PM EDT (GMT-4) OR 3:00-5:00PM EDT (GMT-4). This training will focus on the range of different global population grids, how the grids incorporate remote sensing inputs, and their application to a range of topics from development planning to monitoring progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Upcoming Conference

• The 44th World Hospital Congress of the International Hospital Federation will be held in Barcelona from November 8-11, 2021, as a hybrid in-person and virtual event. The Congress is hosted by La Unió Catalana d’Hospitals (The Catalan Union of Hospitals) with the overarching theme, People on Board: Transforming Healthcare by Blending Agility, Responsiveness, and Resilience. Abstracts are due by April 16, 2021.

Post-doctoral Fellow Opportunities

• Postdoctoral Position: Geospatial Analysis of Mosquito-Borne Disease Transmission: Dr. Mike Wimberly (U. of Oklahoma)’s research team is seeking an enthusiastic postdoctoral researcher to study the environmental determinants of mosquito-borne disease transmission. The position is in the Ecological and Geospatial Research and Applications in Planetary Health (EcoGRAPH) group in the Department of Geography & Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma. The postdoctoral researcher will work on an exciting new NIH project exploring environmental change and urban malaria transmission in India. This is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort with Dr. Courtney Murdock (Cornell) and Dr. Mercedes Pascual (U. of Chicago). His group is leading the geospatial component of the project, so they seek a postdoctoral researcher with strong geospatial modelling skills and experience with (or at least a very strong interest in) disease ecology. The postdoctoral researcher will also have the opportunity to contribute to ongoing projects on malaria and West Nile virus forecasting. If you have any questions, please contact Dr. Mike Wimberly (mcwimberly@ou.edu).
• This post-doctoral fellow opportunity is linked to a FAPESP-sponsored project, as part of the transnational project, “Integrated risk mapping and targeted snail control to support schistosomiasis elimination in Brazil and Cote d’Ivoire under future climate change”. The post-doctoral fellow will be supervised by Dr. Antonio Miguel Vieira Monteiro, at the Laboratory for Investigation of Socioenvironmental Systems (LiSS), at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil. Registration is open until May 31, 2021 (handouts below).

Funding Opportunity

• European Commission’s Early Warning for Epidemics Prize: This prize aims to develop an early-warning system to help prevent disease outbreaks and reduce the impact should they occur. Marjan Van Meerloo (European Commission) will present an overview on this prize at the GEO Health CoP March 30^th telecon!

Updates from the GEO Health CoP

Past (Recorded) Workshop

• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Global Change Research Needs and Opportunities for 2022-2031: This report identifies critical climate change risks, research needed to support decision making relevant to managing these risks, and opportunities for the USGCRP’s participating agencies and other partners to advance these research priorities over the next decade. You can also view the archived Global Change Research Needs and Opportunities for 2022-2031: Report Release Webinar (March 16, 2021).
• American Geophysical Union: Storytelling 101: Identifying and Crafting Narrative Themes on March 11, 2021 at 2:00-3:00PM ET (GMT-5) and Storytelling 101: Making Stories (and your Science) on April 15, 2021 at 2:00-3:00PM ET (GMT-5). Archived Webinars are available on the AGU Webinar YouTube channel.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: The Interplay Between Environmental Exposures and Mental Health Outcomes – A Workshop from February 2-3, 2021.

Upcoming Challenge

• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Partners: The Cleaner Indoor Air During Wildfires Challenge has just opened and will end on May 17, 2021.

Solicitation

• NASA Science Mission Directorate: A.37 Earth Science Applications: Health and Air Quality Applications is open and will close on June 18, 2021.

From HAQAST Team Leader Tracey Holloway

It is my tremendous pleasure to announce the launch of the newest NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST)! We are a team of 14, hailing from research institutions across the US, from Florida to Alaska. And we’re headquartered here, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are at the outset of a four-year mission, which will conclude in late 2025. Our goal? To apply NASA satellite data and products to real-world, air quality and public health needs, wherever they may crop up. And this is where you come in.

While we have our core team, we are in the first stages of building the wider HAQAST community. And it is that wider community—you who are reading this!—who will help determine the course of our applied research. We will soon be looking for stakeholder partners for our Tiger Teams (short term, applied projects focused on specific end-user needs), and we are always looking for input from the stakeholder community on how best to connect NASA data and products with your needs.

So join our newsletter, check out our website, follow us on Twitter and learn about our PIs’ exciting work.

Scientific Articles

• One Health
  • One Health Newsletter: The March 2021 issue has been released! If you are interested in contributing an article for the next Spring/Summer issue (Theme: One Health in Action), please email your topic to the Editorial Team (onehealthnewsletter@gmail.com).
  • UN: Strengthen ‘One Health approach’ to prevent future pandemics – WHO chief
    While the concept of One Health – where multiple sectors communicate and work together to achieve better public health outcomes – may have once seemed simple, “it is no longer”, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “We can only prevent future pandemics with an integrated One Health approach to public health, animal health and the environment we share. Now is the time to take our partnership to a new level”, he underscored.
  • There is also increasing recognition that a One Health approach to food systems is also important and chronic food insecurity and/or distrust of intensively produced food are key drivers of risky practices.  If you’ve not seen this, it might be of interest: https://www.globalhungerindex.org/issues-in-focus/2020.html.
  • Infection Ecology & Epidemiology: Rethinking One Health approach in the challenging era of COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters (by Hajime Kanamori, Hiroaki Baba, and David Weber).
  • One Health journal: The state of One Health research across disciplines and sectors – a bibliometric analysis
• Air Quality
  • Science Alert: There’s a Link Between Air Pollution And Irreversible Vision Loss, Study Reveals.
  • US Environmental Protection Agency: Technical Approaches for the Sensor Data on the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map.
  • Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association: Methods, availability, and applications of PM2.5 exposure estimates derived from ground measurements, satellite, and atmospheric models.
  • Health Effects Institute/Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s Global Burden of Disease project: State of Global Air 2020 Report.
  • Sustainable Cities and Society: Surface and Satellite Observations of Air Pollution in India during COVID-19 Lockdown: Implication to Air Quality. (by Yogesh Sathe, Pawan Gupta, Moqtik Bawase, Lok Lamsal, Falguni Patadia, Sukrut Thipse).
  • Science: Wildfire Smoke, A Potential Infectious Agent (By Leda Kobziar and George Thompson III).
  • EOS: Advances in Satellite Data for Wildfire Smoke Forecasting.
• Climate
  • National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: Global Change Research Needs and Opportunities for 2022-2031: This report identifies critical climate change risks, research needed to support decision making relevant to managing these risks, and opportunities for the USGCRP’s participating agencies and other partners to advance these research priorities over the next decade. You can also view the archived Global Change Research Needs and Opportunities for 2022-2031: Report Release Webinar. 
  • Multi-hazard climate risk projections for the United States (by Binita and colleagues, 2020).
• COVID-19
  • World Meteorological Organization: First Report of the WMO COVID-19 Task Team: Review on Meteorological and Air Quality Factors Affecting the COVID-19 Pandemic (WMO-No. 1262) (Thanks, Juli Trtanj!)
  • Washington Post: Warmer weather by itself won’t curtail the spread of COVID-19, expert panel finds
  • Communications Biology: Estimating and explaining the spread of COVID-19 at the county level in the USA (by Anthony Ives and Claudio Bozzuto).
• Earth Observation
  • GEO Community Blog: Small Work Groups of the GEO Health Community of Practice (by John Haynes, Juli Trtanj, and Helena Chapman).
  • The Earth Observer (November-December 2020): Leveraging Science to Advance Society: The 2020 PACE Applications Workshop (by Erin Urquhart and JoelScott).
  • EOS: Assessing Social Equity in Disasters.
  • Proto Publication of the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Medicine: Eyes in the Sky. Satellite data can be used to assess the health impact of dust storms and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. Additional applications could be on the horizon.
• Global Health
  • Hess J, Boodram L, Paz S, Stewart-Ibarra AM, Wasserheit JN, Lowe R. 2020. Strengthening the Global Health Response to Climate Change and Infectious Disease Threats. BMJ 371:m3081. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3081.
• Heat
  • EOS: Dangerous Heat, Unequal Consequences.
  • US Geological Survey: Mapping Urban Heat Islands Leads NYC Council Data Team to Landsat.
  • Science Magazine: Special section on Keeping Cool in a Warming World.
• Infectious Diseases
  • Caldwell JM, LaBeaud AD, Lambin EF, Stewart-Ibarra AM, Anyamba A, Borbor-Cordova MJ, Damoah R, Gross-Soyster E, Krystosik, Mutuku F, Ndenga B, Beltran-Ayala E, Mejia R, Endy TP, Heras Heras F, Ryan SJ, Shah M, Sippy R, Suner G, Mordecai EA. 2021. Climate explains geographic and temporal variation in mosquito-borne disease dynamics on two continents. Nature Communications 12: 1233. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21496-7.
  • Dungu, B., Anyamba, A. (2021) Rift Valley fever and the challenges of remaining fully prepared for this periodic emergency. OIE Panorama Bulletin. https://oiebulletin.com/?panorama=03-2-2020-2_rvf 
• NASA
  • NASA Web Feature: Paraguay’s First Satellite Deployed From the International Space Station.
  • NASA HARVEST: The HARVEST Newsletter for February 2021 has been released! Please learn about CropsHelmets field data collection campaign, NASA research proposal solicitations, Biomass estimation using vegetation indices, and Selecting the right EO data for crop classification. Please review archived HARVEST Newsletters and subscribe to the listserv.
  • NASA Globe Mission Mosquito: Please review the monthly update (attached document)! Please learn more about the 2021 GLOBE International Virtual Science Symposium.
• ESA
  • European Space Agency: Space in response to COVID-19.
• Australia: Ad astra vita project blog.