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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