Skip to content

About⚓︎

Project Overview⚓︎

The Heiplanet platform is a comprehensive surveillance system designed to monitor and visualize mosquito-borne disease risk across European regions. The platform integrates climate data, epidemiological models, and geographic information to provide actionable insights for public health decision-makers, researchers, and policy planners.

Key Features⚓︎

  • Real-time Disease Risk Assessment: Transmission suitability calculations for West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne diseases
  • Geographic Coverage: European-wide monitoring at NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regional level
  • High-Resolution Data: Global climate data at 0.1° spatial resolution
  • Interactive Visualization: Web-based mapping interface for exploring spatial and temporal disease patterns
  • Open Science: Transparent, reproducible data processing pipeline with full data provenance

Platform Components⚓︎

The Heiplanet platform consists of four integrated components:

  1. Webserver/Frontend: Interactive web interface for data visualization and exploration
  2. Model Backend: Epidemiological models for disease transmission calculations
  3. Data Lake & Database Backend: This repository - data storage, processing pipeline, and API
  4. Data Preprocessor: Climate and environmental data preprocessing tools

Research Group⚓︎

Heidelberg Planetary Health Hub (Hei-Planet)⚓︎

The project is led by the Heidelberg Planetary Health Hub (Hei-Planet), an interdisciplinary research initiative at Heidelberg University focusing on the connections between environmental change, ecosystem health, and human disease.

Hei-Planet brings together expertise in: - Climate science and environmental modeling - Infectious disease epidemiology - Vector biology and ecology - Public health surveillance - Data science and spatial analysis

Development Group⚓︎

Scientific Software Center (SSC)⚓︎

Software development and implementation is provided by the Scientific Software Center (SSC) at Heidelberg University. The SSC specializes in developing sustainable, high-quality research software for the scientific community.

The SSC provides: - Software architecture and design - Full-stack development (Python, JavaScript, database systems) - DevOps and deployment infrastructure - Code quality assurance and testing - Documentation and training support - Long-term software maintenance