Benjamin F Zaitchik
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1340993 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Benjamin F Zaitchik |
| PRENOMES | Benjamin F |
| SOBRENOME | Zaitchik |
| ASSINATURA | ZAITCHIK B F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0698-0658 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 28 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 11 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2013 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Co-designing stormwater adaptations through community-informed urban pluvial flood modeling
Priority climate and health modelling needs
Climate and health modelling is necessary for improving understanding of the current and future distribution and timing of climate-related health risks. However, underinvestment in this area has limited the understanding required to inform policies that enable multisectoral interventions to safeguard health. We synthesised insights from a survey of 65 global climate and health modelling experts and 36 participants in a hybrid meeting to identify …
Sensitivity and vulnerability to summer heat extremes in major cities of the United States
Many cities are experiencing increases in extreme heat because of global temperature rise combined with the urban heat island effect. The heterogeneity of urban morphology also leads to fine-scale variability in potential for heat exposure. Yet, how this rise in temperature and local variability together impacts urban residents differently at exposure-relevant scales is still not clear. Here we map the Universal Thermal Climate Index, a more comp…
Human losses due to climate-related disasters
Missing data in climate impact databases are a source of major bias in disaster impact analyses and can mislead policy making. EMDAT, an international reference data source on disaster impacts, is often used without much quality control or consideration of data gaps. Ignoring these gaps undermines both the evaluation of disaster risk management activities and the evidence base for global policies for early warnings and disaster risk reduction. EM…
Predictors of Evacuation Rates during Hurricane Laura
Machine learning was applied to predict evacuation rates for all census tracts affected by Hurricane Laura. The evacuation ground truth was derived from cellular telephone–based mobility data. Twitter data, census data, geographical data, COVID-19 case rates, the social vulnerability index from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and relevant weather and physical data were…
Augmenting the Social Vulnerability Index using an agent-based simulation of Hurricane Harvey
Flooding and emergency department visits
Toward park design optimization to mitigate the urban heat Island
Lack of vegetation exacerbates exposure to dangerous heat in dense settlements in a tropical African city
Both climate change and rapid urbanization accelerate exposure to heat in the city of Kampala, Uganda. From a network of low-cost temperature and humidity sensors, operational in 2018–2019, we derive the daily mean, minimum and maximum Humidex in order to quantify and explain intra-urban heat stress variation. This temperature-humidity index is shown to be heterogeneously distributed over the city, with a daily mean intra-urban Humidex Index devi…
Estimating changes in emergency department visits associated with floods caused by Tropical Storm Imelda using satellite observations and syndromic surveillance
Heterogeneity in the Effectiveness of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions During the First Sars-CoV2 Wave in the United States
Background: Attempts to quantify effect sizes of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to control COVID-19 in the US have not accounted for heterogeneity in social or environmental factors that may influence NPI effectiveness. This study quantifies national and sub-national effect sizes of NPIs during the early months of the pandemic in the US. Methods: Daily county-level COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first wave (January 2020 through phas…
Earth observations of extreme heat events
La Niña weather impacts dietary patterns and dietary diversity among children in the Peruvian Amazon
Objective: In 2011–2012, severe El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions (La Niña) led to massive flooding and temporarily displacement in the Peruvian Amazon. Our aims were to examine the impact of this ENSO exposure on child diets, in particular: (1) frequency of food consumption patterns, (2) the amount of food consumed (g/d), (3) dietary diversity (DD), (4) consumption of donated foods, among children aged 9–36 months living in the outs…
Night and day
Climate has contrasting direct and indirect effects on armed conflicts
There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a structural equation modeling approach to uncover the direc…
Pathogen-Specific Impacts of the 2011–2012 La Niña-Associated Floods on Enteric Infections in the MAL-ED Peru Cohort
Extreme floods pose multiple direct and indirect health risks. These risks include contamination of water, food, and the environment, often causing outbreaks of diarrheal disease. Evidence regarding the effects of flooding on individual diarrhea-causing pathogens is limited, but is urgently needed in order to plan and implement interventions and prioritize resources before climate-related disasters strike. This study applied a causal inference ap…
Effect of an Additional 30 Minutes Spent Outdoors during Summer on Daily Steps and Individually Experienced Heat Index
Spending time outdoors is associated with increased physical activity; however, high ambient temperature/humidity, together with built environment features in urban versus rural environments, may influence physical activity. We conducted an intervention trial with 89 urban and 88 rural participants performing normal activities on Days 1-2 (baseline) and spending an additional 30 min outdoors on Days 3-7 (intervention) in the summer. Participants …
Malaria Transmission and Spillover across the Peru–Ecuador Border
Border regions have been implicated as important hot spots of malaria transmission, particularly in Latin America, where free movement rights mean that residents can cross borders using just a national ID. Additionally, rural livelihoods largely depend on short-term migrants traveling across borders via the Amazon's river networks to work in extractive industries, such as logging. As a result, there is likely considerable spillover across country…
Associations between Household-Level Exposures and All-Cause Diarrhea and Pathogen-Specific Enteric Infections in Children Enrolled in Five Sentinel Surveillance Studies
Diarrheal disease remains a major cause of childhood mortality and morbidity causing poor health and economic outcomes. In low-resource settings, young children are exposed to numerous risk factors for enteric pathogen transmission within their dwellings, though the relative importance of different transmission pathways varies by pathogen species. The objective of this analysis was to model associations between five household-level risk factors-w…
Temperature anomalies affect violent conflicts in African and Middle Eastern warm regions
Analyzing constraints in the water-energy-food nexus
Water, Geography, and Aksumite Civilization
Vulnerability of sorghum production to extreme, sub-seasonal weather under climate change
In the tropics, extreme weather associated with global climate teleconnections can have an outsized impact on food security. In Ethiopia, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is frequently linked to drought-induced food insecurity. Many projections hold that El Niño events will become more frequent or more intense under climate change, suggesting that El Niño associated droughts may become more destructive. Agricultural vulnerability to extrem…
Influence of the Spatial Resolution of the Exposure Estimate in Determining the Association between Heat Waves and Adverse Health Outcomes
BACKGROUND: Area-level estimates of temperature may lead to exposure misclassification in studies examining associations between heat waves and health outcomes. Our study compared the association between heat waves and preterm birth (PTB) or non-accidental death (NAD) using exposure metrics at varying levels of spatial resolution: ZIP codes, 12.5 km, and 1 km. METHOD: Using geocoded residential addresses on birth (1990-2010) and death (1997-2010)…
The Value of Remotely Sensed Information
A decision framework is developed for quantifying the economic value of information (VOI) from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission for drought monitoring, with a focus on the potential contributions of groundwater storage and soil moisture measurements from the GRACE data assimilation (GRACE-DA) system. The study consists of (i) the development of a conceptual framework to evaluate the socioeconomic value of GRAC…
Water, Geography, and Aksumite Civilization
Temperature anomalies affect violent conflicts in African and Middle Eastern warm regions
Influence of the Spatial Resolution of the Exposure Estimate in Determining the Association between Heat Waves and Adverse Health Outcomes
BACKGROUND: Area-level estimates of temperature may lead to exposure misclassification in studies examining associations between heat waves and health outcomes. Our study compared the association between heat waves and preterm birth (PTB) or non-accidental death (NAD) using exposure metrics at varying levels of spatial resolution: ZIP codes, 12.5 km, and 1 km. METHOD: Using geocoded residential addresses on birth (1990-2010) and death (1997-2010)…
Hyperspectral satellite imagery detection of ancient raw material sources
Soft‐stone vessels (made of the rock chloritite, which is comprised of the mineral chlorite) are an important component of the material culture record of ancient southeast Arabia. Given the prevalence of soft‐stone vessels in domestic and funerary contexts, and the natural geological occurrence of chloritite in the region, archaeologists have long suspected that soft‐stone vessels could have been produced in United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Oman. Ho…
Analyzing constraints in the water-energy-food nexus
On the potential for alternative greenhouse gas equivalence metrics to influence sectoral mitigation patterns
Equivalence metrics used to quantify the relative climate impacts of different atmospheric forcers serve an essential function in policy and economic discussions about global climate change. The 100-year global warming potential (GWP-100), the most established greenhouse gas (GHG) equivalence metric, is used within the Kyoto Protocol, and in most emissions inventory, trading and offset mechanisms, to assign the mitigation value of non-carbon diox…
The Value of Remotely Sensed Information
A decision framework is developed for quantifying the economic value of information (VOI) from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission for drought monitoring, with a focus on the potential contributions of groundwater storage and soil moisture measurements from the GRACE data assimilation (GRACE-DA) system. The study consists of (i) the development of a conceptual framework to evaluate the socioeconomic value of GRAC…
Analysis of the Spatial Variability of Soil Texture in a Tropical Highland
This study sought to analyze the degree of spatial association of soil texture with agro-climatic zones and slope classes on the farmlands of the Jema watershed, in the Northwestern Highlands of Ethiopia. The agro-climatic zones (elevation zones) determine the micro-climate and biota of the study area. Thirty six soil composite samples for texture (the proportion of clay, silt and sand) analysis from four agro-climatic (elevation) zones and seven…
Hyperspectral satellite imagery detection of ancient raw material sources
Soft‐stone vessels (made of the rock chloritite, which is comprised of the mineral chlorite) are an important component of the material culture record of ancient southeast Arabia. Given the prevalence of soft‐stone vessels in domestic and funerary contexts, and the natural geological occurrence of chloritite in the region, archaeologists have long suspected that soft‐stone vessels could have been produced in United Arab Emirates (UAE) or Oman. Ho…
Vulnerability of sorghum production to extreme, sub-seasonal weather under climate change
In the tropics, extreme weather associated with global climate teleconnections can have an outsized impact on food security. In Ethiopia, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is frequently linked to drought-induced food insecurity. Many projections hold that El Niño events will become more frequent or more intense under climate change, suggesting that El Niño associated droughts may become more destructive. Agricultural vulnerability to extrem…
Influence of the Spatial Resolution of the Exposure Estimate in Determining the Association between Heat Waves and Adverse Health Outcomes
BACKGROUND: Area-level estimates of temperature may lead to exposure misclassification in studies examining associations between heat waves and health outcomes. Our study compared the association between heat waves and preterm birth (PTB) or non-accidental death (NAD) using exposure metrics at varying levels of spatial resolution: ZIP codes, 12.5 km, and 1 km. METHOD: Using geocoded residential addresses on birth (1990-2010) and death (1997-2010)…
Night and day
Climate has contrasting direct and indirect effects on armed conflicts
There is an active debate regarding the influence that climate has on the risk of armed conflict, which stems from challenges in assembling unbiased datasets, competing hypotheses on the mechanisms of climate influence, and the difficulty of disentangling direct and indirect climate effects. We use gridded historical non-state conflict records, satellite data, and land surface models in a structural equation modeling approach to uncover the direc…
Pathogen-Specific Impacts of the 2011–2012 La Niña-Associated Floods on Enteric Infections in the MAL-ED Peru Cohort
Extreme floods pose multiple direct and indirect health risks. These risks include contamination of water, food, and the environment, often causing outbreaks of diarrheal disease. Evidence regarding the effects of flooding on individual diarrhea-causing pathogens is limited, but is urgently needed in order to plan and implement interventions and prioritize resources before climate-related disasters strike. This study applied a causal inference ap…
Effect of an Additional 30 Minutes Spent Outdoors during Summer on Daily Steps and Individually Experienced Heat Index
Spending time outdoors is associated with increased physical activity; however, high ambient temperature/humidity, together with built environment features in urban versus rural environments, may influence physical activity. We conducted an intervention trial with 89 urban and 88 rural participants performing normal activities on Days 1-2 (baseline) and spending an additional 30 min outdoors on Days 3-7 (intervention) in the summer. Participants …
Malaria Transmission and Spillover across the Peru–Ecuador Border
Border regions have been implicated as important hot spots of malaria transmission, particularly in Latin America, where free movement rights mean that residents can cross borders using just a national ID. Additionally, rural livelihoods largely depend on short-term migrants traveling across borders via the Amazon's river networks to work in extractive industries, such as logging. As a result, there is likely considerable spillover across country…
Associations between Household-Level Exposures and All-Cause Diarrhea and Pathogen-Specific Enteric Infections in Children Enrolled in Five Sentinel Surveillance Studies
Diarrheal disease remains a major cause of childhood mortality and morbidity causing poor health and economic outcomes. In low-resource settings, young children are exposed to numerous risk factors for enteric pathogen transmission within their dwellings, though the relative importance of different transmission pathways varies by pathogen species. The objective of this analysis was to model associations between five household-level risk factors-w…
Temperature anomalies affect violent conflicts in African and Middle Eastern warm regions
Analyzing constraints in the water-energy-food nexus
Water, Geography, and Aksumite Civilization
Heterogeneity in the Effectiveness of Non-pharmaceutical Interventions During the First Sars-CoV2 Wave in the United States
Background: Attempts to quantify effect sizes of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) to control COVID-19 in the US have not accounted for heterogeneity in social or environmental factors that may influence NPI effectiveness. This study quantifies national and sub-national effect sizes of NPIs during the early months of the pandemic in the US. Methods: Daily county-level COVID-19 cases and deaths during the first wave (January 2020 through phas…
Earth observations of extreme heat events
La Niña weather impacts dietary patterns and dietary diversity among children in the Peruvian Amazon
Objective: In 2011–2012, severe El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions (La Niña) led to massive flooding and temporarily displacement in the Peruvian Amazon. Our aims were to examine the impact of this ENSO exposure on child diets, in particular: (1) frequency of food consumption patterns, (2) the amount of food consumed (g/d), (3) dietary diversity (DD), (4) consumption of donated foods, among children aged 9–36 months living in the outs…
Flooding and emergency department visits
Toward park design optimization to mitigate the urban heat Island
Lack of vegetation exacerbates exposure to dangerous heat in dense settlements in a tropical African city
Both climate change and rapid urbanization accelerate exposure to heat in the city of Kampala, Uganda. From a network of low-cost temperature and humidity sensors, operational in 2018–2019, we derive the daily mean, minimum and maximum Humidex in order to quantify and explain intra-urban heat stress variation. This temperature-humidity index is shown to be heterogeneously distributed over the city, with a daily mean intra-urban Humidex Index devi…
Estimating changes in emergency department visits associated with floods caused by Tropical Storm Imelda using satellite observations and syndromic surveillance
Predictors of Evacuation Rates during Hurricane Laura
Machine learning was applied to predict evacuation rates for all census tracts affected by Hurricane Laura. The evacuation ground truth was derived from cellular telephone–based mobility data. Twitter data, census data, geographical data, COVID-19 case rates, the social vulnerability index from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and relevant weather and physical data were…
Augmenting the Social Vulnerability Index using an agent-based simulation of Hurricane Harvey
Sensitivity and vulnerability to summer heat extremes in major cities of the United States
Many cities are experiencing increases in extreme heat because of global temperature rise combined with the urban heat island effect. The heterogeneity of urban morphology also leads to fine-scale variability in potential for heat exposure. Yet, how this rise in temperature and local variability together impacts urban residents differently at exposure-relevant scales is still not clear. Here we map the Universal Thermal Climate Index, a more comp…
Geography (21 obras) · Environmental Science (15 obras) · Climate change (10 obras) · Ecology (10 obras) · Medicine (10 obras) · Environmental health (8 obras) · Climate Change and Health Impacts (7 obras) · Meteorology (7 obras) · Biology (6 obras) · Climatology (6 obras)