Proceedings Article | 29 December 2008
Shaobo Zhong, Guiwen Lan, Haiguo Zhu, Renqiang Wen, Qiansheng Zhao, Quanyi Huang
KEYWORDS: Geographic information systems, Remote sensing, MODIS, Pathogens, Spatial analysis, Data processing, Viruses, Diffusion, Statistical analysis, Humidity
Because of their inherent advantages, Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) are extremely
useful for dealing with geographically referenced information. In the study of epidemics, most data are geographically
referenced, which makes GIS and RS the perfect even necessary tools for processing, analysis, representation of
epidemic data. Comprehensively considering the data requirements in the study of highly pathogenic avian influenza
(HPAI) coupled with the quality of the existing remotely sensed data in terms of the resolution of space, time and spectra,
the data sensed by MODIS are chosen and the relevant methods and procedures of data processing from RS and GIS for
some environmental factors are proposed. Through using spatial analysis functions and Exploratory Spatial Data
Analysis (ESDA) of GIS, some results of relationship between HPAI occurrences and these potential factors are
presented. The role played by bird migration is also preliminarily illustrated with some operations such as visualization,
overlapping etc. provided by GIS. Through the work of this paper, we conclude: Firstly, the migration of birds causes the
spread of HPAI all over the country in 2004-2005. Secondly, the migration of birds is the reason why the spread of HPAI
is perturbed. That is, for some classic communicable diseases, their spread exhibits obvious spatial diffusion process.
However, the spread of HPAI breaks this general rule. We think leap diffusion and time lag are the probable reasons for
this kind of phenomena. Potential distribution of HPAI viruses (corresponding to the distribution of flyways and putative
risk sources) is not completely consistent with the occurrences of HPAI. For this phenomenon, we think, in addition to
the flyways of birds, all kinds of geographical, climatic factors also have important effect on the occurrences of HPAI.
Through the case study of HPAI, we can see that GIS and RS can play very important roles in the study of epidemics.
