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    Dataset for Tools for mapping multi-scale settlement patterns of building footprints: An introduction to the R package foot

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    This dataset supports the publication: Warren C. Jochem and Andrew J. Tatem. &quot;Tools for mapping multi-scale settlement patterns of building footprints: An introduction to the R package foot.&quot; PLOS ONE.</span

    Explaining the immigrant health advantage: self-selection and protection in health-related factors among five major national-origin immigrant groups in the United States

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    Despite being newcomers, immigrants often exhibit better health relative to native-born populations in industrialized societies. We extend prior efforts to identify whether self-selection and/or protection explain this advantage. We examine migrant height and smoking levels just prior to immigration to test for self-selection; and we analyze smoking behavior since immigration, controlling for self-selection, to assess protection. We study individuals aged 20–49 from five major national origins: India, China, the Philippines, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. To assess self-selection, we compare migrants, interviewed in the National Health and Interview Surveys (NHIS), with nonmigrant peers in sending nations, interviewed in the World Health Surveys. To test for protection, we contrast migrants’ changes in smoking since immigration with two counterfactuals: (1) rates that immigrants would have exhibited had they adopted the behavior of U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites in the NHIS (full “assimilation”); and (2) rates that migrants would have had if they had adopted the rates of nonmigrants in sending countries (no-migration scenario). We find statistically significant and substantial self-selection, particularly among men from both higher-skilled (Indians and Filipinos in height, Chinese in smoking) and lower-skilled (Mexican) undocumented pools. We also find significant and substantial protection in smoking among immigrant groups with stronger relative social capital (Mexicans and Dominicans)

    Identifying residential neighbourhood types from settlement points in a machine learning approach

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    Remote sensing techniques are now commonly applied to map and monitor urban land uses to measure growth and to assist with development and planning. Recent work in this area has highlighted the use of textures and other spatial features that can be measured in very high spatial resolution imagery. Far less attention has been given to using geospatial vector data (i.e. points, lines, polygons) to map land uses. This paper presents an approach to distinguish residential settlement types (regular vs. irregular) using an existing database of settlement points locating structures. Nine data features describing the density, distance, angles, and spacing of the settlement points are calculated at multiple spatial scales. These data are analysed alone and with five common remote sensing measures on elevation, slope, vegetation, and nighttime lights in a supervised machine learning approach to classify land use areas. The method was tested in seven provinces of Afghanistan (Balkh, Helmand, Herat, Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, Nangarhar). Overall accuracy ranged from 78% in Kandahar to 90% in Nangarhar. This research demonstrates the potential to accurately map land uses from even the simplest representation of structures

    Tools for mapping multi-scale settlement patterns of building footprints: An introduction to the R package foot

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    Spatial datasets of building footprint polygons are becoming more widely available and accessible for many areas in the world. These datasets are important inputs for a range of different analyses, such as understanding the development of cities, identifying areas at risk of disasters, and mapping the distribution of populations. The growth of high spatial resolution imagery and computing power is enabling automated procedures to extract and map building footprints for whole countries. These advances are enabling coverage of building footprint datasets for low and middle income countries which might lack other data on urban land uses. While spatially detailed, many building footprints lack information on structure type, local zoning, or land use, limiting their application. However, morphology metrics can be used to describe characteristics of size, shape, spacing, orientation and patterns of the structures and extract additional information which can be correlated with different structure and settlement types or neighbourhoods. We introduce the foot package, a new set of open-source tools in a flexible R package for calculating morphology metrics for building footprints and summarising them in different spatial scales and spatial representations. In particular our tools can create gridded (or raster) representations of morphology summary metrics which have not been widely supported previously. We demonstrate the tools by creating gridded morphology metrics from all building footprints in England, Scotland and Wales, and then use those layers in an unsupervised cluster analysis to derive a pattern-based settlement typology. We compare our mapped settlement types with two existing settlement classifications. The results suggest that building patterns can help distinguish different urban and rural types. However, intra-urban differences were not well-predicted by building morphology alone. More broadly, though, this case study demonstrates the potential of mapping settlement patterns in the absence of a housing census or other urban planning data

    Linking synthetic populations to household geolocations: a demonstration in Namibia

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    Whether evaluating gridded population dataset estimates (e.g., WorldPop, LandScan) or household survey sample designs, a population census linked to residential locations are needed. Geolocated census microdata data, however, are almost never available and are thus best simulated. In this paper, we simulate a close-to-reality population of individuals nested in households geolocated to realistic building locations. Using the R simPop package and ArcGIS, multiple realizations of a geolocated synthetic population are derived from the Namibia 2011 census 20% microdata sample, Namibia census enumeration area boundaries, Namibia 2013 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), and dozens of spatial covariates derived from publicly available datasets. Realistic household latitude-longitude coordinates are manually generated based on public satellite imagery. Simulated households are linked to latitude-longitude coordinates by identifying distinct household types with multivariate k-means analysis and modelling a probability surface for each household type using Random Forest machine learning methods. We simulate five realizations of a synthetic population in Namibia’s Oshikoto region, including demographic, socioeconomic, and outcome characteristics at the level of household, woman, and child. Comparison of variables in the synthetic population were made with 2011 census 20% sample and 2013 DHS data by primary sampling unit/enumeration area. We found that synthetic population variable distributions matched observed observations and followed expected spatial patterns. We outline a novel process to simulate a close-to-reality microdata census geolocated to realistic building locations in a low- or middle-income country setting to support spatial demographic research and survey methodological development while avoiding disclosure risk of individuals

    Effects of health intervention programs and arsenic exposure on child mortality from acute lower respiratory infections in rural Bangladesh

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    BackgroundRespiratory infections continue to be a public health threat, particularly to young children in developing countries. Understanding the geographic patterns of diseases and the role of potential risk factors can help improve future mitigation efforts. Toward this goal, this paper applies a spatial scan statistic combined with a zero-inflated negative-binomial regression to re-examine the impacts of a community-based treatment program on the geographic patterns of acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI) mortality in an area of rural Bangladesh. Exposure to arsenic-contaminated drinking water is also a serious threat to the health of children in this area, and the variation in exposure to arsenic must be considered when evaluating the health interventions.MethodsALRI mortality data were obtained for children under 2 years old from 1989 to 1996 in the Matlab Health and Demographic Surveillance System. This study period covers the years immediately following the implementation of an ALRI control program. A zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression model was first used to simultaneously estimate mortality rates and the likelihood of no deaths in groups of related households while controlling for socioeconomic status, potential arsenic exposure, and access to care. Next a spatial scan statistic was used to assess the location and magnitude of clusters of ALRI mortality. The ZINB model was used to adjust the scan statistic for multiple social and environmental risk factors.ResultsThe results of the ZINB models and spatial scan statistic suggest that the ALRI control program was successful in reducing child mortality in the study area. Exposure to arsenic-contaminated drinking water was not associated with increased mortality. Higher socioeconomic status also significantly reduced mortality rates, even among households who were in the treatment program area.ConclusionCommunity-based ALRI interventions can be effective at reducing child mortality, though socioeconomic factors may continue to influence mortality patterns. The combination of spatial and non-spatial methods used in this paper has not been applied previously in the literature, and this study demonstrates the importance of such approaches for evaluating and improving public health intervention program

    Description of methods for South Sudan 2020 gridded population estimates from census projections adjusted for displacement, version 2.0.

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    This report describes the method used to produce gridded estimates of population sizes, that account for displacement, at approximately 100 m resolution with national coverage across South Sudan. The method uses publicly available census projections from the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics and displacement data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), as well as building footprints from Maxar/Ecopia that were derived from recent satellite imagery.</span

    Classifying settlement types from multi-scale spatial patterns of building footprints

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    Urban settlements and urbanised populations continue to grow rapidly and much of this transition is occurring in less developed countries. Remote sensing techniques are now often applied to monitor urbanisation and changes in settlement patterns. In particular, increasing availability of very high resolution imagery (&lt;1 m spatial resolution) and computing power is enabling complete sets of settlement data in the form of building footprints to be extracted from imagery. These settlement data provide information on the changes occurring in cities, particularly in countries which may lack other data on urbanisation. While spatially detailed, extracted building footprints typically lack other information that identify building types or can be used to differentiate intra-urban land uses or neighbourhood types. This work demonstrates an approach to classifying settlement types through multi-scale spatial patterns of urban morphology visible in building footprint data extracted from very high resolution imagery. The work uses a Gaussian mixture modelling approach to select and hierarchically merge components into clusters. The results are maps classifying settlement types on a high spatial resolution (100 m) grid. The approach is applied in Kaduna, Nigeria; Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Maputo, Mozambique and demonstrates the potential of computational methods to take advantage of large spatial datasets and extract meaningful information to support monitoring of urban areas. The model-based approach produces a hierarchy of potential clustering solutions, and we suggest that this can be used in partnership with local knowledge of the context when creating settlement typologies

    South Sudan 2020 gridded population estimates from census projections adjusted for displacement, version 2.0.

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    This data release includes gridded estimates of population sizes at approximately 100 m resolution with national coverage across South Sudan. This includes estimates of total population sizes and population counts in 40 different age-sex groups. It also includes a breakdown of the total population sizes into internally displaced persons (IDPs) and non-IDPs. These results were produced using publicly available census projections from the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics and displacement data from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), as well as building footprints from Maxar/Ecopia that were derived from recent satellite imagery.</span

    Building footprint data for countries in Africa: to what extent are existing data products comparable?

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    Growth and developments in computing power, machine-learning algorithms and satellite imagery spatiotemporal resolution have led to rapid developments in automated feature-extraction. These methods have been applied to create geospatial datasets of features such as roads, trees and building footprints, at a range of spatial scales, with national and multi-country datasets now available as open data from multiple sources. Building footprint data is particularly useful in a range of applications including mapping population distributions, planning resource distribution campaigns and in humanitarian response. In settings with well-developed geospatial data systems, such datasets may complement existing authoritative sources, but in data-scarce settings, they may be the only source of data. However, knowledge on the degree to which building footprint data products are comparable and can be used interchangeably, and the impact of selecting a particular dataset on subsequent analyses remains limited. For all countries in Africa, we review the available multi-country building footprint data products and analyse their similarities and differences in terms of building area and count metrics. We explore the variation between building footprint data products across a range of spatial scales, including sub-national administrative units and different settlement types. Our results show that the available building footprint data products are not interchangeable. There are clear differences in counts and total area of building footprints between the assessed data products, as well as considerable spatial heterogeneity in building footprint coverage and completeness
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