From Anopheles to Spatial Surveillance: a Roadmap through a Multidisciplinary Challenge

When working on vector borne diseases, decision makers and researchers often face a lack of specific high quality data. However the results/decisions can be critical as they can impact on the lives of many people. This chapter reviews the challenges posed by spatial surveillance of anopheles-borne diseases with particular attention for malaria surveillance. These challenges will mainly reside in the difficulty of getting the appropriate raw data and the large spectrum of multidisciplinary expertise. Raw data include anopheles attributes. Design of sampling strategies is a compromise between the best sampling size for analysis, optimal sampling in space or time and cost-related factors. On the other hand, raw environmental factors from remote sensing products are increasingly available and used but ready to use information on temperature mainly available in Africa and resolution too coarse for detection of water bodies. Moreover the quality and interpretation of final product is dependent of image pre-processing which should be understood by the final user. Those include production of the pixels which do not totally represent environmental value at location, compositing which summarize several images into one to eliminate clouds contamination and production of land cover which represent environmental value at the time of original images capture, develop mosaic classes to gather pixel difficult to discriminate and propose land cover classes not always adapted to the anopheles species habitat. Remote sensing however provides a unique source of information which would not be available otherwise. Modelling techniques are then discussed as well as initiatives to help transfer results and expertise to health professionals in countries.JRC.H.4-Monitoring Agricultural Resource