UCL-ZIKA Mapathon: Mapping of Residential Areas for Mosquito Surveillance in Campina Grande, Northeast Brazil

On Tuesday, 28th of January, researchers from UCL IRDR Centre for Digital Public Health in Emergencies (dPHE) (Professor Patty Kostkova and Dr Anwar Musah), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) (Dr Sarah Wise) and expert mappers from the British Red Cross (Katherine Roberts-Hill and Jiumei Gao) organised an interesting Mapathon session. Through crowd participation, the goal was to map out the entire residential areas of Campina Grande, Brazil.

Campina Grande is an interesting city with varied land-uses in the State of Paraiba. Unfortunately, it is one of many areas in the North Eastern region of Brazil that was hit by the Zika epidemic in 2014/15. UCL IRDR-dPHE alongside researchers from Federal University of Campina Grande and Environmental Health Surveillance agency are working closely to monitor potential mosquito population outbreaks through the development of mobile technologies and GIS. Unfortunately, this area remains unmapped and off-grid. Only scanned paper maps exist for the authorities at Campina Grande, there is presently no spatial data that can be used in a form of early warning detection for potential mosquito outbreaks nor observing the distribution of residential areas inhabited by mosquito breeding. This is where our collaborative research and mapathon comes into play to address such paucity of data.

Students from UCL (IRDR, CASA and Geography), LSHTM as well as external volunteers (GIS experts from London Borough offices, businesses and hikers) and The Red Cross came to this session to learn valuable cartographic skills for digitising scanned paper maps in QGIS. In return, they help us to digitise 47 scanned maps representing the residential areas for neighbourhoods in Campina Grande.

The result – we were able to complete 38 (out 47 neighbourhoods). This corresponds to a completion rate of 79.0% (3,781 out of 4,787) which represent the number of residential block areas that were digitised during the mapathon (see Figure 1). This is effort is extremely impressive! The event received many positive feedbacks from the participants, as well as the evening atmosphere was great and friendly – we all enjoyed drinks and munched on a tonne of delicious pizzas from Icco’s Pizza while mapping!

If you’re interested in attending a similar Mapathon event, follow @TheMissingMaps on Twitter.

To stay up to date with all UCL IRDR dPHE news and events, follow @UCL_dPHE & @UCLIRDR