INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE EDEN 2010 - Emerging Diseases in a changing European eNvironment

The end of a project I have been contributing to over the last 3+ years culminates in the following conference in Montpellier next year. A European funded multi-disciplinary research project co-ordinated over 50+ institutions accross Europe and beyond. It has done some exciting research into the understanding anf spatial modelling of vector-borne disease...

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
EDEN 2010
(Emerging Diseases in a changing European eNvironment)

10-11-12th May 2010
Montpellier, France

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

From 2004 to 2010, the EDEN project (http://www.eden-fp6project.net/) has operated in 24 countries with 49 partner institutions and 80 scientific teams. This represents more than 200 research years of work on the effects of environmental changes on the emergence of vector-borne diseases in Europe .

EDEN is organising an International Conference in Montpellier , 10-12 May 2010, to present its most exciting scientific results to the international community, and to stimulate debates with prominent world scientists in this critical area.

To ensure a wider debate the conference is not restricted to contributions from EDEN partners only but is opened to any interested scientist or research team working on similar topics in Europe or at its fringes.

The conference will cover the following groups of vectors and vector-borne diseases:

- Mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases, including arboviruses (e.g. West Nile Virus, Rift Valley Fever) and malaria,
- Ticks and tick-borne diseases,
- Rodents and rodent-borne diseases,
- Sandflies and sandfly-borne diseases.

The content of poster and oral communications presented during the conference should focus on:

- The identification of high-risk ecosystems for the emergence of vector-borne diseases,
- Biological, ecological and epidemiological processes involved in the emergence of vector-borne diseases, and their modelling,
- Applications for improved vector or disease monitoring, and disease information systems.

Registration will officially begin from 30th September 2009, but advance submissions of proposed talks, or posters, are welcome from now on. The EDEN Steering Committee will take the final decision on which talks and posters will be included in the final programme.

More information on the conference is available at http://international-conference2010.eden-fp6project.net/

We would be grateful if you could advertise this conference widely.

The EDEN coordinator

EDEN Data Portal: A resource for publically available European environmental data:

This is "one of our" data portal sites we manage for a European research project Emerging Diseases in a changing European eNvironment (EDEN). It is designed as a data repository and resource primarily for the project members, however we have made all the data that is publically available elsewhere on the web available to anyone who takes a minute to register. This data includes satellite imagery, cleaned gazeteers, land cover, DEM, and climate data to name a few.

Link to the EDEN Data Archive here.

All the data is clipped to the EDEN extent which includes Europe and parts of the North coast of Africa.. We have even cleaned some of the data up for you or added value in other ways, for instance in the NGA Gazeteer dataset we have removed any place names that are labelled in one country but are georeferenced to another.

Even though most of the data will be available from elsewhere on the web, the fact the EDEN Data portal has so many datasets in one place it is a fantastic place to start looking for what data is available.

The datasite has also one of the most extensive list of GIS links around, over 1000 in all and has a number of tutorials for a variety of GIS software. The site is well worth a look!

FYI: The site was designed and is managed by Euro-AEGIS a partnership of ERGO (my employer) and Avia-GIS for the EDEN Project.

The Malaria Atlas Project

The Malaria Atlas Project published the first global risk map for malaria for 40 years earlier this month. It is possible to download the maps as either KMZs, flat image files or PDFs. there are also some 3D representations as PDFs and some animations.

Malaria Risk Map: Check out the Data and find out more for yourself here.

There was a small piece in The Times on the manager of the project Dr Simon Hay to mark the release of these maps which you can view here.

The Malaria Atlas Project is a Wellcome Trust funded joint project between the Malaria Public Health & Epidemiology Group, Centre for Geographic Medicine, Kenya and the Spatial Ecology & Epidemiology Group, University of Oxford, UK with collaborating nodes in America and Asia Pacific region.