The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

This plenary will start the symposium and we welcome participation from geographers, GIScientists, health researchers, other scientists, and stakeholders at the 2023 AAG Annual Meeting to address the challenges of global pandemics, climate change, and food security. This session will address visions on health research related to infectious diseases, pandemics, pandemic readiness, climate change, food security, environmental health, and public health crises.

Prof. Mei-Po Kwan (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) will start the opening plenary with her presentation on Big Data Analytics for Addressing Global Pandemics. Spatio-temporal big data, technologies and human mobility analysis are very useful for the studies of global pandemics such as COVID-19. These analyses need high-resolution space-time big data of people’s mobility and interactions to identify effective control measures. In this presentation, Prof. Kwan will discuss the use of spatiotemporal big data and methods in studying the global pandemic. The fundamental behavioral concepts and uncertainties related to these analyses will also be discussed. She will also highlight the importance of space-time strategies for non-pharmaceutical interventions and relevant policy recommendations for future pandemics.

Prof. Tim Schwanen (University of Oxford) will continue the conversation about the importance of high-resolution space-time big data of people’s mobility and interactions for understanding pandemics and other health crises. He will focus on the usefulness of mixed method approaches in which big data are combined with other types of data and materials, and discuss key advantages of pursuing this kind of approach. These include, but are not limited to, the communication of findings and outcomes to diverse audiences.

Prof. Xun Shi (Dartmouth College) will present a topic on the impact of environmental changes on human health. Specifically, he will deliver a talk for the audience about the spatiotemporal variation of vector-borne diseases under climate change and land use/land cover changes at the local, regional, and global scales, as well as the applications of geospatial approaches, including geocomputation and GeoAI in the exploration, identification, modeling, simulation, and prediction of dynamics of diseases under environmental changes.

This session is part of the AAG Symposium on Geospatial Approaches to Pressing Grand Challenges: Global Pandemics, Climate Change, and Food Security.

Non-Presenting Participants