Mapping Malaria Vector Habitats in West Africa: Drone Imagery and Deep Learning Analysis for Targeted Vector Surveillance

Disease control programs are needed to identify the breeding sites of mosquitoes, which transmit malaria and other diseases, in order to target interventions and identify environmental risk factors. The increasing availability of very-high-resolution drone data provides new opportunities to find and characterize these vector breeding sites. Within this study, drone images from two malaria-endemic regions in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire were assembled and labeled using open-source tools. We developed and applied a workflow using region-of-interest-based and deep learning methods to identify land cover types associated with vector breeding sites from very-high-resolution natural color imagery. Analysis methods were assessed using cross-validation and achieved maximum Dice coefficients of 0.68 and 0.75 for vegetated and non-vegetated water bodies, respectively. This classifier consistently identified the presence of other land cover types associated with the breeding sites, obtaining Dice coefficients of 0.88 for tillage and crops, 0.87 for buildings and 0.71 for roads. This study establishes a framework for developing deep learning approaches to identify vector breeding sites and highlights the need to evaluate how results will be used by control programs

Technical Workflow Development for Integrating Drone Surveys and Entomological Sampling to Characterise Aquatic Larval Habitats of Anopheles funestus in Agricultural Landscapes in Côte d'Ivoire.

Land-use practices such as agriculture can impact mosquito vector breeding ecology, resulting in changes in disease transmission. The typical breeding habitats of Africa's second most important malaria vector Anopheles funestus are large, semipermanent water bodies, which make them potential candidates for targeted larval source management. This is a technical workflow for the integration of drone surveys and mosquito larval sampling, designed for a case study aiming to characterise An. funestus breeding sites near two villages in an agricultural setting in Côte d'Ivoire. Using satellite remote sensing data, we developed an environmentally and spatially representative sampling frame and conducted paired mosquito larvae and drone mapping surveys from June to August 2021. To categorise the drone imagery, we also developed a land cover classification scheme with classes relative to An. funestus breeding ecology. We sampled 189 potential breeding habitats, of which 119 (63%) were positive for the Anopheles genus and nine (4.8%) were positive for An. funestus. We mapped 30.42 km2 of the region of interest including all water bodies which were sampled for larvae. These data can be used to inform targeted vector control efforts, although its generalisability over a large region is limited by the fine-scale nature of this study area. This paper develops protocols for integrating drone surveys and statistically rigorous entomological sampling, which can be adjusted to collect data on vector breeding habitats in other ecological contexts. Further research using data collected in this study can enable the development of deep-learning algorithms for identifying An. funestus breeding habitats across rural agricultural landscapes in Côte d'Ivoire and the analysis of risk factors for these sites

Corn crops identification using multispectral images from unmanned aircraft systems

Climate change and migration of population from rural to urban areas are affecting the agricultural production around the world. This study was based in the particular department of Ancash - Peru where corn is one of the most important crops of the region. Authorities in this region are concerned in finding a method, different from census; that can constantly monitor corn crops areas. This data is important to evaluate how these two causes will impact on food security in Ancash. The first part of the present thesis reviews the current techniques in the recognition of crop areas using remote sensing and multispectral images. The second part explains the methodology developed for this study, considering the data acquisition using Unmanned Aircraft Systems, the preparation of the acquired data and two deep learning model approaches. The first approach is based on binary classification of corn patches using Le Net model with near infrared images. The second one describes the segmentation of corn areas in different stages using the U-net model, in this case five band images were considered. The third part shows the results of both approaches. From these results it is concluded that training a model with data from different stages and scenarios of two campaigns (2016 and 2017) can achieve a 95% of accuracy in corn segmentation.Tesi

Corn Crops Identification Using Multispectral Images from Unmanned Aircraft Systems

International audienceCorn is cultivated by smallholder farmers in Ancash - Peru and it is one of the most important crops of the region. Climate change and migration from rural to urban areas are affecting agricultural production and therefore, food security. Information about the cultivated extension is needed for the authorities in order to evaluate the impact in the region. The present study proposes corn areas segmentation in multi-spectral images acquired from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), using convolutional neural networks. U-net and U-net using VGG11 encoder were compared using dice and IoU coefficient as metrics. Results show that with the second model, 81.5% dice coefficient can be obtained in this challenging task, allowing envisaging an effective and efficient use of this technology, in this hard context