Geography Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2773
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Item Interdisciplinary Geospatial Assessment of Malaria Exposure in Ann Township, Myanmar(2020) Hall, Amanda Hoffman; Loboda, Tatiana V; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite considerable progress toward malaria elimination in Myanmar, challenges remain owing to the persistence of complex focal transmission reservoirs. Nearly all remaining infections are clinically silent, rendering them invisible to routine monitoring. Moreover, limited knowledge of population distributions and human activity on the landscape in remote regions of Myanmar hinders the development of targeted malaria elimination approaches, as advocated by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is especially true for Ann Township, a remote region of Myanmar with a high malaria burden, where a comprehensive understanding of local exposure, which includes the characterization of environmental settings and land use activities, is crucial to developing successful malaria elimination strategies. In this dissertation, I present an interdisciplinary approach that combines satellite earth observations with two separate on-the-ground surveys to assess human exposure to malaria at multiple scales. First, I mapped rural settlements using a fusion of Landsat imagery and multi-temporal auxiliary data sensitive to human activity patterns with a classification accuracy of 93.1%. A satellite data-based map of land cover and land use was then used to assess landscape-scale malaria exposure as a function of environmental settings for a subset of ten villages where a malaria prevalence survey was carried out. While multiple significant associations were discovered, the relationship found between malaria exposure and satellite-measured village forest cover was the most significant. Finally, a separate detailed survey that explored a variety of land use activities, including their frequency and duration along with testing for clinical or subclinical malaria, was used to identify and quantify factors promoting an individual’s likelihood of malaria infection regardless of the environmental settings. This analysis established strong associations between malaria and individual land use activities that bring respondents into direct contact with forested areas. These results highlight that the current Myanmar malaria elimination strategies, which focus on prevention from within the home (i.e., bednets and indoor spraying), are no longer sufficient to remove remaining malaria reservoirs in the country. A paradigm shift in malaria elimination strategies towards targeted interventions that can disrupt malaria transmission in the settings where the exposure occurs are critical to achieving country-wide malaria elimination.Item ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF CHANING DIETARY QUALITY(2018) He, Pan; Baiocchi, Giovanni; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The food sector has been recognized as a significant contributor to multiple environmental issues including GHG emissions, water shortage and contamination, ecological disruption, etc., while the malnutrition issues has been increasingly affecting global public health over the years, especially in developing countries such as China where the diet patterns have been shifting considerably over the decades. To develop a sustainable diet that can minimize the environmental impact while meeting nutritional quality targets within economic affordability and cultural acceptability, knowledge is required on how these aspects are interconnected via dietary patterns not only for different countries but also across heterogeneous subnational socio-economic status. The overall aim of this research is to quantitatively evaluate the environmental impacts and nutritional quality of different dietary patterns characterized by socio-economic status. With this overarching question, this study explores three specific research questions that address the historical and assumed dietary patterns at different scales: 1) How have the environmental impact of the Chinese dietary patterns changed with the human nutritional quality for different socio-economic groups over the years? 2) How would an improvement in nutrition quality change the dietary environmental footprints in China? 3) How would the global adoption of healthy diets affect the environmental impacts in each country caused by agricultural production? This dissertation is a synthesized analysis combining the environmental impact accounting and dietary quality evaluation. It links individual food consumption records with environmental impact factors and dietary recommendations to quantitatively analyze the nutrition-environmental nexus for individuals from different income groups, living areas, and countries, and compare how such nexus differ by these socio-economic features. In this way, this dissertation identifies opportunities and challenges in achieving a “win-win” solution for protecting the natural environment and improving public health jointly for individuals from various socio-economic contexts. Its findings provide implications for goal setting and cost-benefit analysis of integrative policymaking concerning joint nutrition development and environmental management.