A model for the Geographical Analysis and monitoring of agricultural areas example and tests in south Italian regions

Water quality has an high impact on human health. Chemical mixtures deployed in the environment can lead to multilevel contamination, going from groundwater through surface water, crops, vegetables, livestocks and, finally, humans. Groundwater can be contaminated by the percolation of chemical compounds due to various management errors, which can be mainly re-conducted to vulnerability of the ground to pollution or wrong management of waste sites. The impact of groundwater contamination on human health is a serious problem and the risk of pathogen outbreaks must be predicted and, when possible, contained. Our study has the goal of automatically selecting high risk areas to reduce the risks of infection. We performed analyses on a dataset of farm companies containing analyses on their livestocks urine and faeces samples, water sourcing, crops samples and ground samples. We searched for multi-pathogens in these samples and we built an epidemiological model inferring groundwater contamination from indirect evidence, considering a normalized severity score for the analyses results. With this information we selected the contamined waterways, which define potential areas of high impact on the health of people living nearby. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. HealthGIS’14, November 04-07 2014 Dallas/Fort Worth, TX, USA Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-3136-4/14/11 ...$15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2676629.2676639.