UCL-British Red Cross: Missing Map Mapathon

We are very excited to announce that UCL’s Centre for Digital Public Health (DPHE) & Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis (CASA), in collaboration with the British Red Cross, will be hosting a Missing Maps Mapathon on Tuesday 28th of January, 2020. This interactive session will focus on mapping out residential areas of a small suburb called Campina Grande, which is an area in Brazil that was hit hard by the Zika epidemic. It is an area that is largely unmapped and therefore remains off-the-grid. In this activity you will be supporting the UCL ZIKA Project (led by DPHE) in generating these maps depicting the residential areas for the 48 neighbourhoods in Campina Grande using QGIS. This information will be of great benefit for the local environmental authorities in Brazil and will support their mosquito surveillance effort against Zika.

Everyone – from beginners, advance to expert mappers – UCL students and public - are welcome to attend. For beginners, especially, this will be a great chance to learn new skills on map creation, cartography and GIS. This session will be the perfect opportunity to network with peers and consume pizzas and drinks while mapping!

The event will be a relaxed introduction to both mapping and the ZIKA project, jointly led by experts from the British Red Cross (Katherine Roberts-Hill and Jiumei Gao) as well as academics from UCL’s CASA (Dr Sarah Wise) and DPHE (Professor Patty Kostkova and Dr Anwar Musah) whose professional and research expertise converge at the nexus of mapping.

Event Schedule

18:00 to 18:15

Presentation: How to digitise areas in QGIS (Dr Anwar Musah)

18:15 to 19:15

Session: Missing Maps Mapathon

19:15 to 19:45

Break time: Pizza and Drinks

19:45 to 20:45

Session: Missing Maps Mapathon (cont.)

20:45 to 21:00

Wrap-up: Saving work and closing

Project Details

This interdisciplinary project, funded by the UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), is an international collaboration between University College London (UK), Federal University of Pernambuco (Brazil) and Federal University of Campina Grande (UFC). The overarching goal of this project is to evaluate the impacts of environmental and climatic changes on the habitats and breeding patterns of the mosquito population in Northeast Brazil and to support the Brazilian Environmental and Public Health agencies in their fight against mosquitoes that can potentially spread Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya. By harnessing mobile and geospatial technologies, we aim to support these Brazilian institutions in their effort for establishing a contemporary system for mosquito surveillance at a household-level and beyond, with a particular focus on Campina Grande.