Health Geography

The topic for today’s lecture is Geography and Health. Because spatial location is a very big factor for health-related concerns, such as children living near a highway having higher chance of developing asthma, geography (and more specifically, GIS) is a very useful discipline for examining and treating health issues. John Snow’s 1854 map of a cholera outbreak in London is a classic example of the intersection of spatial geography and health – the map showed that cholera was caused by contaminated water ended up changing public policy. Another way geography is useful to health is figure out the ideal way to provide medical services – e.g. figuring  out the ideal hospital to accept people from a far away town.

Another classic example is a map showing changes in rates of obesity, usually between different states in different time periods in the United States.

Another related concept is Medical Geography – the application of geographical perspectives to investigate health-related topics. Medical geography emerged in the 1980s, but In recent times, it has been overshadowed by Health Geography. Health Geography takes a slightly different approach by taking emphasis away from the dominant biomedical view. Nowadays, Medical geography is seen as too narrow, and health geography is preferred.

Health geography can take a qualitative, quantitative, or mixed research approach.

Example of health geography research areas (may be useful for project ideas):

• services, infrastructures, land-use planning
• Disease mapping, modelling, surveillance
• health service use
• inequalities in health outcomes
• Environmental health risk factor assessment

On Wednesday we listened to a presentation on transformative research in GIS.

Transformative research – research that shifts or breaks existing scientific paradigms

This is a short week (no Monday class). We spent the Wednesday talking about the expectations and ideas for the project. One option is work together with community groups – in this way, we can both do our project, and do something helpful for the community.

Some ideas proposed by other students:

• Looking at loss of agricultural land in BC
• Looking at rain-on-snow events in BC
• Looking at correlations between gunfire shots, crime, and various demographics such as racial make-up of an area

Presentation Summary:

Paper reviewed: Urbanization and its implications for avian aggression: A case study of urban black kites (Milvus migrans) along Sagami Bay in Japan

Focus of study: Aggressive and bold nature of Black Kites in Japan

Research question: Is there a link between urbanization and avian (black kite) aggression?

Researchers’ Hypotheses:

• H1 – the more people present in an area with black kites, the more bold/aggressive the birds would be
• H2 – the less viable habitat (green space) in an area, the more bold/aggressive the black kites

Methods:

Field Data: 5 beach areas along Sagami Bay in Japan that are close to each other to increase homogeneity. In each area, an observer recorded numbers of people, black kites, and black kite attacks, from a single observation point within a 2km radius buffer. Data was recorded in Spring, Summer and Spring.

Gis Data: Vector map of Japan was taken, and the amount of green space in every 2km buffer zone was calculated, and broken down by type (e.g. forest).

Analysis:

Aggression Index (AI) Calculated

Data Table, displaying the gathered Field/GIS data and the AI:

Results:

• H1 rejected – no statistically significant correlation between number of human visitors and  black kite aggression
• H2 accepted – notable negative correlation (-0.59) between amount of green space and black kite aggression – the more green space, the less bold/aggressive the black kites
• In particular, the more forest/agricultural green space, the less aggressive the birds are
• Out of the three observation periods, birds found to be most aggressive in Spring (mating period)

Conclusion:

• The paper did answer its original question – they found a link between urbanization (in this case, related to loss of habitat) and increased black kite aggression.
• The paper then suggested that Japan needs to do a better job of future land use planning to preserve bird habitat in order to prevent current and future avian aggression
• I rate the paper 6/10
• Limitations of the study/paper – did not account of possibility of 1 bird performing multiple attacks / did not account for many other human factors such as traffic noise, pollution, etc / correlation was not very strong (-0.59) so results could be questioned

Comments on other Presentations:

There were several presentations I found interesting, like Forrest’s paper on the Amur tiger and Khonrad’s paper on the Bearded Saki monkey. Both of these presentations were interesting because they focused on charismatic mega-fauna, the kinds of animals that people want to preserve because they find them aesthetically and culturally pleasing.

In particular, I think Khonrad did a good job of pointing out the shortcomings of the paper he looked at, such as not using GPS trackers attached to monkeys to get far better analysis (including monkey movement during nighttime).