Background: Since 1999, the expansion of the West Nile virus (WNV) epizooty has led public health authorities to build and operate surveillance systems in North America. These systems are very useful to collect data, but cannot be used to forecast the probable spread of the virus in coming years. Such forecasts, if proven reliable, would permit preventive measures to be put into place at the appropriate level of expected risk and at the appropriate time. It is within this context that the Multi-Agent GeoSimulation approach has been selected to develop a system that simulates the interactions of populations of mosquitoes and birds over space and time in relation to the spread and transmission of WNV. This simulation takes place in a virtual mapping environment representing a large administrative territory (e.g. province, state) and carried out under various climate scenarios in order to simulate the effects of vector control measures such as larviciding at scales of 1/20 000 or smaller.
Public health decision makers need to better understand the propagation of zoonoses. The currently available zoonosis simulations are based on compartment models which do not integrate the influence of geographic features on the species' biological processes. In this context, we propose an approach that can generate an informed virtual geographic environment (IVGE) composed of a set of cells in which the evolution and interaction of the involved populations can be simulated plausibly. Since the number of these cells is huge, we propose a threshold-based merging algorithm that creates spatial subdivisions with the maximal size and suitability for a given biological phenomenon. Our approach also enhances each cell with qualitative and quantitative information such as the relative geographic orientation of the neighbors and the information about the distribution of individuals through trajectories. We used our IVGE to develop decision support tools that can simulate the spread of the West Nile Virus and Lyme disease.
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