BackgroundIn the past two decades the east African highlands have experienced several major malaria epidemics. Currently there is a renewed interest in exploring the possibility of anopheline larval control through environmental management or larvicide as an additional means of reducing malaria transmission in Africa. This study examined the landscape determinants of anopheline mosquito larval habitats and usefulness of remote sensing in identifying these habitats in western Kenya highlands.MethodsPanchromatic aerial photos, Ikonos and Landsat Thematic Mapper 7 satellite images were acquired for a study area in Kakamega, western Kenya. Supervised classification of land-use and land-cover and visual identification of aquatic habitats were conducted. Ground survey of all aquatic habitats was conducted in the dry and rainy seasons in 2003. All habitats positive for anopheline larvae were identified. The retrieved data from the remote sensors were compared to the ground results on aquatic habitats and land-use. The probability of finding aquatic habitats and habitats with Anopheles larvae were modelled based on the digital elevation model and land-use types.ResultsThe misclassification rate of land-cover types was 10.8% based on Ikonos imagery, 22.6% for panchromatic aerial photos and 39.2% for Landsat TM 7 imagery. The Ikonos image identified 40.6% of aquatic habitats, aerial photos identified 10.6%, and Landsate TM 7 image identified 0%. Computer models based on topographic features and land-cover information obtained from the Ikonos image yielded a misclassification rate of 20.3–22.7% for aquatic habitats, and 18.1–25.1% for anopheline-positive larval habitats.ConclusionOne-metre spatial resolution Ikonos images combined with computer modelling based on topographic land-cover features are useful tools for identification of anopheline larval habitats, and they can be used to assist to malaria vector control in western Kenya highlands.

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in 26 journals in the GIScience community. Only the journals included in the Science Citation Index (SCI), Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) are included. The four indices are among the core collections of Web of Science according to Clarivate Analytics (http://mjl.clarivate.com/). The journals focus more on remote sensing and photogrammetry (e.g., ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) are not included because this review focuses on publications upon GIS.The keyword 'VGI' instead of 'volunteered geographic information' is used for the search of articles about volunteered geographic information (VGI). Thus, articles in which the term 'volunteered geographic information' is unabbreviated (a lowfrequency term) are not included in this review, which are considered of minor relevance to VGI. Other terms related to VGI (e.g., user-generated content, social media, and neogeography) are not used as keywords for the literature search, as this review focuses on VGI as the primary perspective or point of research. The keyword 'VGI' serves as a central point ('seed') for us to identify other terms (perspectives) related to VGI from articles involving the term 'VGI'. Except for GIScience & Remote Sensing and Journal of Geographical Systems, all the remaining 24 journals have returned articles involving the term 'VGI'. Only research articles and review articles are retrieved. Other contributions such as commentaries, editorials, project reports, or communications are excluded. Articles in which 'VGI' is not the abbreviation of 'volunteered geographic information' are ignored. This results in 374 articles.From these 374 articles, we have further manually removed 28 articles in which VGI plays a minor role, e.g., VGI is briefly mentioned in the discussion (Frazier et al. (2018) or is a related topic rather than the focus (Brovelli et al. (2015). The article filtering process results in 346 articles (326 research articles and 20 review articles) in which VGI is the main topic of exploration or at least is used as a source of data. Each of the 20 review articles is about a sub-topic of VGI, such as VGI quality assessment methods (Senaratne et al. 2017) and VGI for natural hazards (Klonner et al. 2016); none provides a comprehensive review and is thus treated as the input in the analysis of this review.

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