Assessing the Geographic Context of Risk Perception and Behavioral Response to Potential Ebola Exposure.

The 2014⁻2016 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) epidemic outbreak reached over 28,000 cases and totaled over 11,000 deaths with 4 confirmed cases in the United States, which sparked widespread public concern about nationwide spread of EVD. Concern was elevated in locations connected to the infected people, which included Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. This threat of exposure enabled a unique opportunity to assess self-reported knowledge about EVD, risk perception, and behavior response to EVD.

Terra Populus' Architecture for Integrated Big Geospatial Services.

Big geospatial data is an emerging sub-area of geographic information science, big data, and cyberinfrastructure. Big geospatial data poses two unique challenges to these and other cognate disciplines. First, raster and vector data structures and analyses have developed on largely separate paths for the last twenty years and this creates an impediment to researchers utilizing big data platforms that do not promote the integration for these classes.

Assessing American Red Cross First Aid mobile app user trends: Implications for resilience.

Objective: Disasters have devastated communities, impacted the economy, and resulted in a significant increase in injuries. As the use of mobile technology increasingly becomes a common aspect of everyday life, it is important to understand how it can be used as a resource. The authors examined the use of American Red Cross mobile apps and aimed to characterize user trends to better understand how mobile apps can help bolster individual and community preparedness, resilience, and response efforts.

An analysis of ozone damage to historical maize and soybean yields in the United States.

Numerous controlled experiments find that elevated ground-level ozone concentrations ([O3]) damage crops and reduce yield. There have been no estimates of the actual yield losses in the field in the United States from [O3], even though such estimates would be valuable for projections of future food production and for cost-benefit analyses of reducing ground-level [O3]. Regression analysis of historical yield, climate, and [O3] data for the United States were used to determine the loss of production due to O3 for maize (Zea mays) and soybean (Glycine max) from 1980 to 2011, showing that over that period production of rain-fed fields of soybean and maize were reduced by roughly 5% and 10%, respectively, costing approximately $9 billion annually.

Spatial video geonarratives and health: case studies in post-disaster recovery, crime, mosquito control and tuberculosis in the homeless.

Background: A call has recently been made by the public health and medical communities to understand the neighborhood context of a patient's life in order to improve education and treatment. To do this, methods are required that can collect "contextual" characteristics while complementing the spatial analysis of more traditional data. This also needs to happen within a standardized, transferable, easy-to-implement framework.