The 4th International Conference on Diagnosis of Environmental Health by Remote Sensing was held in Fuzhou, Fujian Province from September 28 to 30, with an attendance of nearly 300 experts from CAS, other research academies and universities. The event was hosted by the Center for Applications of Spatial Information Technologies in Public Health (CASITPH).
Experts attending the conference had in-depth discussions and exchanges on four topics: research on spatial technologies and infectious disease forecasting & early warning; multi-source remote sensing technology and environmental health; global climate change and environmental health; regional application of spatial information technologies. Keynote reports were made by 14 experts, including Research Fellow Loris Vescovo from Edmund Mach Foundation, Italy; Professor Ranga B. Myneni from Boston University; Professor Ramesh P. Singh from Chapman University, the United States; Research Fellow LI Guoqing from RADI; Research Fellow WANG Jinfeng from the CAS Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, whose reports were respectively entitled “Biophysical Parameters and Remote Sensing Technology for Photosynthesis”; “Seasonality of Leaf Area in the Amazon Rainforest”; “Monitoring of Data Changes in Terrestrial, Oceanic and Atmospheric Environments by Multi-source Satellites”; and “National Data Sharing Platform for Comprehensive Earth Observation”; and “Mapping of Risk Sandwiches”.
The conference achieved fruitful results. Agreements were signed for international cooperative research on environmental health diagnosis by remote sensing between CASITPH and Professor Ranga B. Myneni, Professor Ramesh P. Singh and Research Fellow Loris Vescovo, and between the Spatial Information Research Center of Fujian Province and Professor HUANG Bo of Chinese University of Hong Kong and Dr. Rumiana Vatseva of the Institute of Geography, Bulgaria.
Main tasks for Year 2015 were discussed and defined at the conference. In the upcoming new year, research achievements of environmental health remote sensing science will be applied to the Digital Earth system platform; with the support of the existing network environment, an “Earth remote sensing clinic” will be established to provide a scientific and technical basis for the study of the Earth health; by giving full play to their collective advantages, all research organizations will carry out cutting-edge studies on the strategy of environmental health remote sensing, jointly nurture talents and build world-class professional teams in this field; a new academic journal “Environmental Health Diagnosis by Remote Sensing” will be created to serve as a platform for academic exchanges between world-renowned scholars in this area.
The first international conference on diagnosis of environmental health by remote sensing was hosted by CASITPH in 2011, and this year’s event was the fourth. Jointly founded by RADI, AMMS Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, and BNU Remote Sensing and GIS Research Center on 28 November 2003, CASITPH is headed by CAS academician Prof. LI Xiaowen, with its organizational entity built based on RADI.
